Screening #2 is at
the Ahrya Fine Arts on March 2nd at 7:30 pm. Mr. Stratton is also
scheduled to be on hand. In addition, screenwriter Walon Green is scheduled to
appear. He won an Academy Award in 1971 for directing the documentary, The Hellstrom Chronicle. He went on to
write such films as Sorcerer and The Brinks Job for director William
Friedkin and The Border for Tony
Richardson.

Actor L.Q. Jones is
on the list, too. He worked on several other Peckinpah movies, beginning with Ride the High Country, along with Major Dundee, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, and Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid. He co-starred in Hang ‘Em High, Hell Is For Heroes, and Martin Scorsese’s Casino.

Actor Bo Hopkins is
also scheduled to appear. He co-starred in Peckinpah’s The Getaway and The Killer
Elite, and he also appeared in such films as The Day of the Locust, American
Graffiti, Midnight Express, and The Newton Boys.

From the press
release:

The Wild Bunch

Part
of our Anniversary Classics series. For details, visit: laemmle.com/ac.

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary
Classics Series celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of the iconic and groundbreaking
movies of the '60s, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. This graphically violent
and poetic film exploded the very concept of the traditional Western by
focusing on a brutal group of outlaws trying to survive at the dawn of the 20th
century. Featuring four Oscar-winning actors—William Holden, Ernest Borgnine,
Ben Johnson, and Edmond O’Brien—along with a startling supporting cast, the
film clearly established Peckinpah as one of the top directors of the era.

The director’s classic 1962 Western Ride
the High Country had demonstrated his talent, but he ran into conflicts with
producers on subsequent projects in the '60s. The Wild Bunch marked his
triumphant return to filmmaking. He wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay with
Walon Green, from a story by Green and Roy N. Sickner. It is set in 1913, on
the eve of World War I and in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. A botched
robbery in the opening sequence leads the outlaws to seek refuge in Mexico,
where they continue to be pursued by a group of bounty hunters hired by the
railroad company they have robbed. Robert Ryan, cast as a former friend of
Holden’s character, leads the pursuers.

The film’s violence was shocking to
many viewers at the time, and some critics denounced the film. Others, however,
saw the violence as reflecting the disruptions in American society, along with
the chaos of the Vietnam War. Life magazine’s Richard Schickel called the film
“one of the most important records of the mood of our times and one of the most
important American films of the era.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby hailed
the film as “very beautiful and the first truly interesting American-made Westerns
in years.” When cuts that had been made shortly after the film’s release were
finally restored for a 1995 reissue, critics were even more ecstatic. Writing
in The Baltimore Sun, Michael Sragow declared, “What Citizen Kane was to movie
lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969.” The film was added to
the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1999.

The
Playhouse 7 is at 673 E Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91101.l
The phone number is (310) 478 – 3836.

The
Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre is located at 8556 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA
90211. The phone number is (310) 478 – 3836.

The
1970’s were a time of much spookiness and speculation in this country. Unidentified
Flying Objects (UFO’s), a publicity-shy Plesiosaur called Nessie steaking out
the Scottish Highlands, Sasquatch “sightings”, ghosts, satanic cults, witchcraft,
and the threat of nuclear catastrophe highlighted the newspapers when Vietnam, Richard
Nixon and Watergate weren’t. Between 1977 and 1982, Leonard Nimoy’s narration
provided the basis for nearly 150 speculative and generally outright creepy
episodes of In Search Of…Similarly-themed
television specials were even categorized by TV Guide as “speculation” in their
genre listings. I even recall a scenario in 1979 that was reported in a local
newspaper concerning the discovery of ribcages and bowls of blood at a nearby
campground. Yikes!

May
1970 saw the release of Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson’s book The Late Great Planet Earth, a
grimly-titled caveat in eschatological terms detailing the end of the world and
destruction to humankind as we know it (it was followed up in 1972 with Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth and in 1982 with The
1980s: Countdown to Armageddon). The genesis of this line of
thinking has its roots in the Holy Bible, specifically the Book of Revelation
which is the final book of the New Testament. What better way to get the word
out than in a major motion picture? The book was optioned for a film in 1976 by
Pacific International Enterprises, known as PIE for short, which was both a
film production and distribution company founded two years earlier by Arthur R.
Debs (it folded in 2001) for
the purpose of releasing “family films”. How they came to the subject of
Armageddon is anyone’s guess. Between 1976 and 1978, interviews were conducted
with renowned thinkers, scientists and religious folks to get their views and
interpretations of the Bible and the promise of pestilence.

The
film sports the same title as the book and was released in a good number of
neighborhood theatres on Wednesday, January 17, 1979. It opens with a sequence
involving a group of men chasing a Gandalf wannabe up a mountain (in reality,
Vaszquez Rocks in California where Captain James T. Kirk fought the Gorn in the
Star Trek episode “Arena” in 1966) and pushing him to his death. These are
actors, of course, and they look like they might have tried out to be the
apostles in Martin Scorsese’s first attempt to bring The Last Temptation of Christ to the screen via Paramount Pictures on
a minimal budget. Orson Welles appears with a skull meant to represent the fallen
man from thousands of years earlier and sets the film’s tone by explaining how
the ancient Hebrews believed that a prophet was God’s Man and spoke the Words
of God, foretelling, many centuries before, of events to come. The prophet was
killed because he wasn’t accurate one hundred percent of the time and therefore
was deemed a fraud.

The
film talks of the Anti-Christ entering the world of politics – shades of Omen III: The Final Conflict (1983)? There
are many predictions made using stock footage to enunciate impending doom. However
interesting or frightening the claims, the orator’s guessing of the timeline is
vague at best. Something that was
correctly predicted at the time of the film’s shooting was the estimate of the
world population 40 years hence to be roughly 8 billion people. It is closer to
7.5 billion, but not a bad estimate.

Earthquakes,
world famine, floods, killer bees (I recall this threat in 1979 and wondered
how they came about. The film provides the not-so-surprising explanation) were
the stuff of disaster movies in the 1970s. I’m not sure if Planet Earth is a statement of veracity or pure bollocks, but it’s
an interesting examination of prophesies, nonetheless.

The
film has been recently released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber/Scorpion and the transfer is
exceptional. There are two bonus features. The first is a making-of featurette
that runs fourteen minutes and is comprised of interviews with nearly ten
people behind-the-scenes. Roger Riddell is the film’s producer who discusses
how the movie came into being. Alan Belkin, President of American Cinema, a
division of American Communications Industries, shares his memories of the
film. The rough cut was two hours; the film’s running time is 86 minutes. Composer
Dana Kaproff provides an exceptional score that is one of the film’s
strongpoints (it deserves a soundtrack album release) and he explains his role
as a composer. Tom Doddington, head of Sound and Production, explains how Orson
Welles was a consummate professional, going so far as to record his voiceover
at his house. Thomas Nicely, one of the actors running in the opening sequence,
also weighs in. Lynn McCallon and Anne Goursaud were editors on the film. Jean
Higgins, Head of Production for American Cinema, and David Miller, Head of
Distribution, discuss the film’s marketing.

Bonus
features consist of a selection of trailers: theatrical trailer and TV spot for
The Late Great Planet Earth (1979); Go Tell the Spartans (1978) theatrical
trailer, Charlie Chan and the Curse of
the Dragon Queen TV spot; The Apple
(1980) theatrical trailer; and The
Salamander (1981) theatrical trailer.

If
you’re one of the many moviegoers who are unfamiliar with the Jacques Lacerte
thriller Love Me Deadly, you’re not
alone. A product of early 1970s low-budget motion picture production, this film
is the sole title directed by Mr. Lacerte who passed away in 1988. Lensed in
1971 and released in San Francisco right around the same time as Gerard
Damiano’s wildly popular and controversial couples-flick Deep Throat in June 1972 just before the Watergate burglary, the
film played in roughly ten markets, including rained-out drive-ins, before it nearly
disappeared from view. However, there are subsequent movie posters for the film
that have the audacity to mention William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and give the impression that spiritual
possession is somehow to blame for the unsavory goings-on. It’s not.

Love Me Deadly was originally titled Kiss Me Deadly, however Mickey Spillane had
the rights to that title, hence the name change. What is billed as a story of
demonic diabolical deeds is rather a heartbreakingly tragic tale of a young
woman who cannot seem to connect with men…who are alive. The film never really
seems to get a grip on how it wants to play out the subject matter at hand but
you get the feeling that the director is attempting to pass the film off as
some sort of dissertation on necrophilia which, in my humble opinion, is one of
the most incomprehensible, disgusting, and desperate of all sexual proclivities
and one that I can only hope is
relegated to the cinema. I interpreted the film from a much different
perspective, so each viewer might see something differently due to the film’s
inability to construct a single tone.

The
opening credits play over images of a happy young girl, Lindsay Finch, playing
with her father who dotes on her, pushes her on a swing, and comforts her when
she falls. As an adult, Lindsay (Mary Charlotte Wilcox) is a looker who tries
her best to make friends with attractive men. She leads on Wade Farrow (the
late Christopher Stone of 1981’s The
Howling and 1983’s Cujo, sans his
trademark ‘stache) only to rebuff him when he makes sexual advances. Like Harold
and his pal Maude, Lindsay looks through the newspapers and attends afternoon
wakes of complete strangers although her reasons for doing so are far more
disturbing: she attempts amorous contact with the recently deceased. While
about town, she hones in on men who bear a resemblance to her father whom we
can safely assume has passed. Meanwhile Fred (Timothy Scott), a funeral
director of Morningside Mortuary (the name anticipates 1979’s Phantasm), catches her and persuades her
to join him after hours in necrophilic activities with similarly afflicted
gonzos who don black mass-like capes in a ritual prior to becoming intimate
with corpses, the victims of Fred’s nocturnal cruisings along the Sunset Strip
in search of johns and prostitutes.

Lindsay
takes a liking to Alex Martin (Lyle Waggoner) whom she sees as a father figure.
They court and marry soon afterwards, although their bedroom habits suffer
greatly as she’s unable to allow Alex to make love to her. He’s patient and
even sleeps in another room yet becomes suspicious of his wife’s behavior when
he follows her to the funeral parlor and sees her enter the premises. When he
asks her about it later on, she denies going there at all. A brief conversation
with the housekeeper who practically raised her leads Alex to the cemetery in
the film’s most heartbreaking scene wherein Lindsay is dressed in pigtails,
playing around her father’s grave like a child. Anyone who has seen enough
horror films knows how the film will end so while it’s not a shocker, it’s actually
tragically sad given how her father died and the guilt that Lindsay feels. This
is the biggest issue that I have with the film. While the ads promise one
thing, what you get is something much different. The biggest evidence of this
is in the inclusion of elegiac songs sung by Kit Fuller that play over the kinderscene that opens the film and the romantic
silliness between she and Alex. This is, a sequence that seems to have been borrowed
from the overlong romantic interlude that plagues Clint Eastwood’s otherwise
crackerjack Play Misty for Me (1971),
with Roberta Flack crooning on that film’s soundtrack for nearly five minutes. The
original movie poster even claims that Lindsay is 18, however she’s clearly in
her early to mid-twenties.

Following
the financial success of John Carpenter’s Halloween
(1978) and Sean Cunningham’s Friday the
13th (1980), movie studios were making slasher films in large
quantities. They didn’t necessarily want
to, they just knew that there were scores to be made at the box office. Producers
and directors alike were trying to come up with the next big franchise to keep
pumping out money makers for years to come. The success of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
directly inspired The Toolbox Murders
(1978). Likewise, Maniac (1980),
released in New York City on Friday, January 30, 1981 (the same day as David
Cronenberg’s Scanners), was the
result of a brainstorming conversation between the film’s eventual director
Bill Lustig and his friend Frank Pesce (who can be seen as the restaurant manager
in James Toback’s 1978 film Fingers
and as fugitive Carmine in Martin Brest’s 1988 comedy Midnight Run. His life story was also the subject of the 1991
comedy 29th Street,
directed by George Gallo who, incidentally, penned Midnight Run). The idea was to make a horror film that could be
billed as “Jaws on land.” Jaws (1975), of course, changed the
cinematic landscape and how movies are distributed and promoted using catchy tag
lines, effective advertising campaigns, and rolling out a film in hundreds of
movie theaters at once. It also provided the basis for obvious and cheap
imitations and rip-offs. Maniac isn’t
so obvious to the untrained eye.

Shot
back-to-back in the fall and brutal winter of 1979 with much of the same crew from
Friday the 13th, Maniac stars the under-rated,
under-utilized and, unfortunately, late Joe Spinell, an actor of considerable
range who, despite his intimidating stance and demeanor, was actually a
thoughtful and exceedingly nice personality on the set and behind-the-scenes,
always eager to help fellow performers. Here he plays Frank Zito, a middle-aged
man who lives alone in a New York City apartment amid toys and mannequins who
double as his friends and personal company following a childhood ruined at the
hands of an overbearing and physically abusive mother whom he lashes out
against when he comes into physical contact with women. Following in the
footsteps of the slasher films of the time, Maniac’s
theme of an outcast with sexual hang-ups has provided more than enough fodder
as a theme for disturbed young men who engage in ruthless killing sprees. Frank
converses with the mannequins which are adorned with the real scalps and
clothing of women who met their end at his hands, thus giving credence to the
notion that serial killers keep trophies of their victims, a point spouted by
Clarice Starling in The Silence of the
Lambs ten years later. Not all his victims are women, however. One night he
follows a couple and shoots the man (Tom Savini!) point blank with a double-barreled
shotgun before adding his girlfriend to his macabre collection. On another night he spots two nurses at a
hospital (one of them is played by former porn actress Sharon Mitchell) and
follows one of them into a subway bathroom in the film’s creepiest and most
unsettling sequence.

A
chance encounter with a photographer named Anna (Caroline Munro, who actually
got her start as an actress after someone took her photograph and entered the
winning image into a contest) leads him to her apartment. Anna doesn’t appear
to be the slightest bit concerned that he obtained her name and address from
her camera bag and invites him in! They soon begin a platonic friendship, but one
of Anna’s model friends, Rita, catches Frank’s eye at one of her photo shoots
and soon meets a terrible end. Anna is oblivious to this fact until she
accompanies Frank to his mother’s grave with flowers and all hell breaks loose
and heads towards an ending that is inspired until the final shot which is
often relegated to the domain of slasher films, most notably Michele Soavi’s
1987 stylish giallo classic Stagefright.

Maniac developed a notorious reputation for
its then-shocking violence, angering feminists from coast to coast. While it’s
still fairly disturbing even by today’s standards, there is an argument to be
made that AMC’s The Walking Dead is
infinitely more savage. Shot on 16mm, the film holds up very well and has now
been made available on Blu-ray in a three-disc set that includes a transfer
mastered from a 4K restoration of the original camera negative.

Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) returns in The Night Strangler (1973), a follow-up
TV-movie to the previous year’s unexpectedly successful The Night Stalker. Kolchak has been booted out of Las Vegas and
settles in Seattle and teams up with his old boss Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland)
just as a string of suspicious murders begin to plague the metropolis. It comes
to his attention that the victims, young female exotic dancers, are turning up
dead after having had their necks crushed, drained
of a small amount of blood, and most disturbingly all had instances of rotting
flesh on their necks. The murders occur over a period of 18 days.

Through
a researcher, Carl learns that a nearly identical series of killings took place
in 1952 (21 years earlier) for the same duration, and then 21 years prior to
that, all the way back to at least 1889 (this notion was exploited to horrific
effect in Stephen King’s masterful 1986 novel, It, wherein a malevolent creature appears every 27 years under the
guise of Pennywise the Dancing Clown and goes on a murder spree to remain alive).
The police want Kolchak to cease his own investigation and temporarily arrest
him so that he won’t print anything that will alarm the public.

Carl
later uncovers information that leads him to a surgeon who was stationed on the
Union Army side of the Civil War and the “Underground City” of Seattle figures
into this surprising revelation of the identity of the man who is attempting to
remain immortal over the millennia. It’s a really cool idea in theory, although
in practice the sequence drags on a bit longer than it should.

The Night Strangler, shot in July of 1972 and aired on
January 16, 1973, follows Kolchak and his aggravated boss as they bicker, yell,
and disagree on what the facts are. The producers of the original film figured
that if the public liked the original so much, they may as well give them
something similar the second time around, and that’s just what they got. Robert
Cobert returns to provide a spooky and playful score and Richard Matheson is on
board again helming the teleplay. Sitting in the director’s chair this time
around is Dan Curtis, the creator of Dark
Shadows, the long-running TV horror series as well as its two theatrical
films from the early 1970s. He went on to direct what is widely considered to
be one of the scariest TV movies of all-time, Trilogy of Terror (1975), and the theatrical film of Robert Marasco’s
Burnt Offerings (1976), an equally
frightening thriller. He does a fine job building suspense and keeping the
streets of Seattle lit like a film noir,
although the film suffers a bit from its extended running time with sequences wherein
Kolchak enlists the help of a lady friend (JoAnne Pflug) walking the streets in
the middle of the night to entrap the killer, or later when he roams the
streets of the “Underground City” searching for the killer. Why is it that
whenever women start being killed off, others feel the need to walk home alone
on deserted streets?

Kino
Lorber has released the film in a 4K restoration and the film looks like it was
just shot. In addition to this, there are some great new extras:

Audio
commentary with Tim Lucas – Mr. Lucas provided the wonderful commentary on this
film’s predecessor and he does the same here. He has been writing about movies
for well over 35 years. I first read his articles in Video Times Magazine in
the mid-1980’s and published Video Watchdog magazine from 1990 to 2018. He has
done some terrific commentaries in the past for Mario Bava’s work among many
others, and he does the same here. One thing viewers will notice is that this
second Kolchak outing runs 90 minutes as opposed to the first film’s 74 minutes.
This is due to the fact that the original TV version, which also ran 74
minutes, is considered lost, and this 90-minute cut is actually the theatrical
version that was released in Europe, something that was also done with Steven
Spielberg’s 1971 TV-movie Duel. That
telecast also received a theatrical release here in the States in April 1983
and it’s the 90-minute cut of that film that audiences know today.

There
is also a high definition, ten-minute 2018 interview with music composer Robert
Cobert who is an absolute delight to listen to. This is the same interview that
appears on the Blu-ray of The Night
Stalker. At nearly 94 years of age he describes how he comes up with music
as he watches the rough cut and also discusses the stressful deadlines he was
handed to compose and conduct the score simply because he was the last person
brought in on the project. I have loved his music since I saw Burnt Offerings on television in 1981
and he has a signature sound. If you can find it, this CD has some of his best work.

There
is a standard definition interview with producer Dan Curtis that was shot
around 2003/2004 (he passed away in 2006) that runs seven and-a-half minutes
wherein he talks about how wonderful and fun it was to make these films, and I
really got a sense from him that he meant what he said when he reminisced about
the good old days.

There
is also a trailer for Burnt Offerings
(1976); a limited edition booklet essay by film critic and author Simon Abrams;
and beautiful new artwork by artist Sean Phillips.

It’s
also nice to have subtitles for a change and I’m happy to report that Kino
Lorber has provided those on this release, too. Let’s hope that they continue
this practice I with their future releases.

I
was three years-old when John Llewellyn Moxey’s The Night Stalker premiered on the ABC Movie of the Week on January
11, 1972 and it took me nearly twenty years to catch up with it on a late night
rerun on a local ABC-TV affiliate. Featuring the terrific late character actor
Darren McGavin in the role of Carl Kolchak, an intrepid reporter who wants to
print the truth regardless of what his editor says after finding himself in the
midst of several murders, The Night
Stalker, penned by the great Richard Matheson based on an unpublished
novel, is a delightful slice of early 1970s spooky entertainment fare that is
most definitely a product of a time that was populated by groovy music on the
radio, TV dinners, and little kids getting tossed around in the backs of mammoth
station wagons. The Las Vegas of 1971 when this movie was shot is much
different from the Las Vegas of 2018. For one thing, the bulk of filming takes
place in what is in present day known as the Fremont Street area. Much of Vega$, the television series starring
Robert Urich that ran from 1978 to 1981, was also filmed in this location as
well, so it will no doubt look familiar to viewers.

Kolchak
is like a cross between photographer Arthur (Usher) Fellig, better known as
Weegee, and Jeff Daniels’s Will Macavoy on HBO’s The Newsroom. He wants the scoop but he wants to tell it the way it
is: truthfully. We are introduced to him after the events have occurred and the
action is told in flashback as Kolchak, unshaven and nearly impecunious in a
run-down motel, is writing a book about the events that have happened. Someone,
or something, is stalking the
residents of Las Vegas and draining them of a portion of their blood. The
authorities (Kent Smith and Claude Akins) are keeping a tight rein on Kolchak
so as to avoid public embarrassment and panic. The suspect is Janos Skorzeny (Barry Atwater), a
creepy-looking man who bears a resemblance to Jonathan Frid of Dark Shadows fame.

Kolchak
gets into frequent and boisterous arguments with his editor Tony Vincenzo
(Simon Oakland, forever known as the deus
ex machina psychiatrist at the end of 1960’s Psycho) about letting people know the truth, especially if they are
in danger of dying at the hands of Skorzeny,
who appears to be a vampire following failed attempts to shoot him dead after
his break-in of a blood bank at a local hospital. Vincenzo wants to keep the
newspaper’s reputation clean and urges Kolchak not to print such events for
fear of frightening the public. Far from being the first television series to
deal with vampires, it exercises restraint in the depiction of violence against
women, though the results do not shy away from showing some blood – this was,
after all, the era of the televised Vietnam War. One of the earlier victims is
a young woman whose mother is played by actress Virginia Gregg, who provided
the voice of Mother in Psycho and Psycho II. Carol Lynley plays a
prostitute, though her profession is only alluded to in her introductory scenes.
She is a lady friend of Kolchak’s, with modern parlance applying the moniker of
“friends with benefits” to their relationship; she’s twenty years Kolchak’s
junior and urges him to read up on vampires. Kolchak eventually makes his way
to Skorzeny’s lair in an effort to
get the story on his own and uses standard items from his Anti -Vampire Kit
such as a crucifix and the sun through broken glass in an effort to kill him
(or it). A twist has Kolchak leaving
Vegas with his tail between his legs at the urging of the authorities, his
determination to tell the truth at its strongest when he ends up at the motel that
we saw him at the start.

In the days before the home video revolution
made its way into my family, the only way to see a movie on television was to
either watch it when it was aired or beg my grandmother to ask her brother to
record it for me on his $1200 Magnavox video tape recorder. Just before
Halloween in 1983, she told me of a movie that she had seen in a local theater in
1954 called The Maze, which starred
one of her favorite actors, Richard Carlson. Channel 5 in New York was showing
it at 2:30 am and we later viewed it at her brother’s house on VHS. I recall a
TV trailer for Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession
airing during the commercial break, oblivious that it would become one of my
favorite horror movies seven years later.

The
Maze,
which was released in 3-D in July 1953 and played at the RKO Albee Theater in
Brooklyn, NY with William Beaudine’s Roar
of the Crowd with Howard Duff of all things, has all of the charms that one
associates with B-movies of the 1950s. After a brief 1979 theatrical re-release
of TheCreature From the Black Lagoon (1954) in 3-D, the format was
experiencing a resurgence at the box office beginning in the early 1980s with Ferdinando
Baldi’s Comin’ at Ya!, which I was so
disappointed to see was rated R! The Maze
is a film that lacks action, something that was all too familiar in the 3-D
resurgence and exactly what you want from the format. There is a lot of talking
and discussions up until the very end, and this review contains spoilers regarding
the very ridiculous denouement, so
you’ve been warned!

Richard Carlson plays a Scotsman with no
Scottish accent named Gerald MacTeam on vacation in Cannes. He’s engaged to his
girlfriend Kitty (Veronica Hurst) and the pair seem perfectly happy until he
receives a letter from William, his Uncle Samuel’s butler, informing him of his
uncle having taken sick. Despite not having a relationship with his uncle (a
Baronet), Gerald feels a moral obligation to go to his side and pushes aside
his initial reluctance to help. Uncle Samuel resides in the foreboding Craven
Castle, a stately manor bereft of modern conveniences such as electricity or
telephones and it isn’t long before he passes away, his obituary capturing
Kitty’s eye despite no communication from Gerald. Kitty is perplexed by his
silence until he writes her some weeks later, “releasing” her from the
engagement.

Kitty and her aunt make their way to the
castle and Gerald is unsurprisingly distressed to see them both. He also looks
like he’s aged fifteen years and is unceremoniously aloof. Kitty and her aunt
stay the night, and Kitty discovers a hidden passage (remember the hidden room
in 1979’s The Changeling?) that leads
to a lookout tower which reveals a hedge maze in the rear of the castle (think
1980’s The Shining) and detects
strange noises and movement in the middle of the night. The remainder of the
film attempts to keep this secret from the audience and when its revealed to
eyes 66 years hence, it’s difficult not to laugh. The “secret” is a frog-like
monster who used to be the castle’s master and meets an untimely death
following a horrific illness. In the end, Gerald is able to return to a normal
existence.

Plagiarism,
if done willingly and poorly, generally does not go unnoticed and one cannot
help but see certain similarities in various works be it literature, art, or
cinema. In listening to the audio commentary with author Jonathan Rigby and director Alvin Rakoff on
the new, limited edition Blu-ray of 1980’s Death
Ship, a horror oddity about an abandoned old ship inhabited by the ghosts
of members of the Third Reich(!), a remark is made that the poster for 2002's Ghost Ship was remarkably similar to the poster art for Death Ship, and it’s true that the
similarities are uncanny. I can't help but wonder who came up with the idea for
the poster for Ghost Ship,
as Death Ship was well over twenty-five
years-old and seemed to be relegated to the land of forgotten cinema.

Captain Ashland (George
Kennedy) is at the helm of a cruise ship, about to turn over the reins to Captain Trevor Marshall (Richard Crenna) and he's
not happy about it. He seems perturbed by this changing of the guard,
commenting in no uncertain terms that his place as captain should be regarded
as more than something of a novelty to tourists. Unfortunately for him and his
guests, the unmanned and haunted titular ship that steers ahead, powered by the
blood of its most recent victims, is on a crash course to meet with his. Using
footage borrowed from Andrew L. Stone's The Last Voyage (1960) and Ronald Neame’s The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the two vessels collide and Ashland’s ship begins to fill with water and
quickly sinks (too bad The Concorde:
Airport ’79 didn't sink with it!)

Kennedy,
Crenna, Nick Mancuso (who provided the bulk of the horrifying phone calls in
Bob Clark's 1974 film Black Christmas),
Sally Ann Howes of Dead of Night
(1945) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
(1968) and a few other characters manage to be the only survivors in a lifeboat
and make their way aboard the decrepit ship that put them in their predicament.
Once on board, they find the ship bereft of passengers and crew, and slowly
become victims of the supernatural games that ensue.

As
the plot unfolds, it becomes apparent that the ship in question was once used
as a Nazi torture chamber, as evidence of teeth, clothing and medical devices
start to turn up in explored rooms. The worst of these rooms houses a group of
cobweb-infested corpses, presumably the long-dead Jews whom the Nazis tortured.
One might wonder about the boundaries of bad taste pushed in a film that seems to
make light of one of humanity's most horrendous and egregious atrocities.

The
director employs some nifty scare tactics, such as a projector that runs
itself; a shower that turns blood red; and a crazed George Kennedy, apparently
possessed by the long-dead Nazis, going on a rampage. One must wonder why
distress signals are not sent, and why help is not forthcoming, given the radio
rules in place since the downing of the Titanic in 1912. However, this is a
B-movie shot in five weeks and done on a shoestring and asking too many
questions is not suggested. The ship in this film is supposed to be steering
itself with a life of its own, however one never really gets the feeling that
it’s actually alive, that it’s a merchant of evil like the house in Burnt Offerings (1976) or the hotel in The Shining (1980). The film ends the
way one assumes with will, but it’s not bad for what it is.

Originally
released on DVD in England in 2007, Death
Ship had at the time had been transferred from a print that was not perfect
and contained a few sporadic imperfections but was believed to be the best
surviving source material. That disc had included a disclaimer citing the film
lab that housed the original camera negative closed in the late 1980's and the
aforementioned resources were "lost" as a result. I would be curious
as to how this sort of thing happens as this is certainly not the first time it
has occurred, nor will it be the last. I'm always reading of an original
negative somehow getting "lost". Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell, the TV-movie that Crenna made the
year prior to Death Ship, was
released on DVD at roughly the same time and that movie looks like it was just
made yesterday. Honestly, Devil Dog’s
transfer could not be more beautiful. Yet a theatrical film's negative gets
"lost"? Insert quizzical expression here.

Alfred
Sole is a production designer who has carved out a nice career for himself in
Hollywood, most notably on the television shows Veronica Mars (2004-7), Castle
(2009-16), and the reboot of MacGyver
(2017-18). Long before he chose that line of work however, he dabbled in the
world of film directing. His first film, the 1972 hardcore sex “comedy” Deep Sleep, must be seen to be believed
because despite a few flourishes of cinematic style and several humorous
sequences involving dialogue, it’s just a hardcore sex romp featuring folks no
one in their right mind would want to see naked let alone copulating. There is
absolutely nothing in this film to suggest that he would next direct one of the
greatest and most thematically disturbing thrillers of our time, 1976’s Communion, not to be confused with the
Christopher Walken/alien-probe-up-the-old-dirt-road 1989 outing based on Whitley
Strieber’s 1987 “non-fiction” book of the same name. His subsequent films,
1980’s Tanya’s Island with the late
and impossibly gorgeous Denise Matthews (credited as “D.D. Winters”) and 1982’s
star-studded comedy Pandemonium both
fared poorly at the box office, hence his career change. Thankfully Communion, with its high cinematic style
and deceptively low production budget, refused to die.

In
her screen debut, Brooke Shields plays Karen Spages (rhymes with “pages”), the
younger sister of Alice Spages, the latter brilliantly portrayed by New
Jersey-born actress Paula Sheppard. Karen is favored by everyone around her and
can do no wrong, mostly because Alice is a, forgive the pun, holy terror. Alice
teases Karen, locks her in a building to scare her, and mistreats her communion
veil. Why the horseplay? Alice was conceived out of wedlock and is not entitled
to receive the Holy Eucharist. As if this is her fault.

On
the day of her first communion Karen is brutally murdered right in the church
and all suspicion points to her sister after she finds the discarded veil and
wears it to the altar. This sets in motion some truly well-acted scenes wherein
the identity of the killer is constantly in question. Everyone suspects Alice,
even her neighbor Mr. Alphonse (Alphonse DeNoble), an obese monstrosity you
must see to believe. Karen and Alice’s mother Catherine (Linda Miller) is
grief-stricken and meets her ex-husband Dom (Niles McMaster) at the funeral. Afterwards,
there are suspicions about Alice’s whereabouts during Karen’s murder and Alice
submits to a polygraph which she mischievously pushes on to the floor. Her Aunt
Annie (Jane Lowry) battles with her sister and the latter accuses her of hating
Alice because of her sinful status. Annie refutes this until she herself is
attacked in a shockingly bloody sequence and fully believes that Alice is the
killer.

Alice takes place circa 1961 as evinced by the production design,
the old-style cars, the calendar on the wall, and the prevalence of a poster of
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) that
can be seen if one really looks for it. Originally reviled amid concerns that
it’s an attack against the Catholic Church (how can it not be?), the film was
met with lukewarm box office. Director Sole was rumored to have stated that the
church was simply the milieu he wanted to set the story against, but the
commentary infers otherwise. It’s one of the most Catholic-themed films I’ve
ever seen, even more so than William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). It has a look, a feel, and an atmosphere all
its own. This film is quite simply one of the best low-budget American horror
films ever made. It boasts a superbly eerie score by Stephen Lawrence who scored
a handful of other films. Yours Truly has been wishing for a soundtrack album
of this music for years, however one has yet to surface. Great editing,
wonderful set design, and excellent music all come together to make Alice an enjoyable shocker that can
easily be viewed more than several times.

This
film has had a strange history. Filmed in Mr. Sole’s hometown of Paterson, NJ
in the summer of 1975, Alice
premiered in Paterson (Lou Costello’s old stomping grounds) under its original
title Communion on Saturday, November
13, 1976 at the Fabian Theater (now the Fabian Building). The event was met
with much fanfare, however a subsequent theatrical release failed to stir much
interest. Communion was dropped by
the original distributor, picked up by another, retitled Alice, Sweet Alice, re-cut and
redistributed in 1981 as Holy Terror
and played up Ms. Shields’s participation in response to the success of the
previous year’s The Blue Lagoon. It
then made its way to cable television and local independent stations where the
bulk of us caught up with it. Later on it was relegated to VHS collecting dust
in discount bins beginning in 1985 with Goodtimes Home Video, seemingly forever
to be lost within the public domain due to a legal snafu. I bought it for ten
dollars, which was unheard of in an era when the MSRP on a VHS tape was roughly
eighty dollars. In 1998, the film received a laserdisc release from the Roan
Group which sported a highly entertaining audio commentary from director Sole
and the film’s editor, Edward
Salier. The film was given two DVD releases later on, which ported over the
commentary. Even without the benefit of Sole's discussion, one can
easily see the influence that Nicolas Roeg's astonishing Don’t Look Now (1973) has on this
film.

Movie-going
audience members under the age of forty will not recall motion picture
theatrical exhibition in the 1970s. It was a most interesting time when
drive-ins and even first-run movie theaters would pair up an older feature
film, generally one that was one to two years-old, with the main feature on a
double-bill. A handful of theaters in my area used to engage in midnight showings
of older films, too. One theater exclusively ran The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) for years while another
alternated between Stanley Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968), Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards
(1971), Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains
the Same (1976), David Lynch's art-house favorite Eraserhead (1977) and Alan Parker's Pink Floyd The Wall (1982). Other showcases included uncensored
bloopers featuring Carol Burnett, the Three Stooges, and Abbott and Costello.

In
October 1978, Attack of the Killer
Tomatoes was unleashed upon the moviegoing public (filming had begun in
early 1977). The film is an effort to poke fun at the Japanese disaster and monster
invasion films of the 1950’s and 1960’s, movies that, according to director
John DeBello, were mostly unfamiliar to the moviegoing public. Billing itself
as a comedy, to today's eyes, it's really anything but that. Despite a few
laugh out-loud sequences the film, which runs nearly 90minutes, feels nearly twice that length. There are many films that came
out during this era that are disjointed and suffer from ineffective editing like
Attack. Black Socks (aka Video Vixens)
(1974) was an effort to introduce hardcore sex into a comedy and failed
miserably. The Groove Tube (1974) and
Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video (1979) are two
other inane attempts at hilarity. However, there are some truly funny films in
this vein, as 1977’s Kentucky Fried Movie
and Airplane! in 1980, can attest to.
In Attack, there is a humorous scene
wherein military officials all cram into a small room for an impromptu meeting
to discuss the best course of action against the tomato attack; a sequence
involving a blind traffic cop; a badly dubbed Japanese official; and the
requisite Jaws parody – bested by the
aforementioned Airplane!

Attack recalls the similar premise of George
A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
(1968) wherein dead bodies inexplicably are reanimated and begin feeding on
human flesh. The one major difference here is that the unsuspecting American
public is under attack by giant, killer tomatoes. The plot is almost too
convoluted to be believed for a send-up, but the basic premise involves the
government attempting to keep the seriousness of the tomato attacks under wraps
so as not to give way to mass hysteria and have to call in the military.

What
makes people laugh today is apparently different from what made people laugh forty
years ago. However, there are certain comedies that are timeless. No matter how
old I get, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges never
fail to make me laugh. There aren't too many films made in the last thirty to
forty years I can claim are able to do that. Even It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), with its television viewings
and innumerable home video releases, is still to this day laugh out-loud
hilarious. The interaction between all the characters is truly astonishing.
There is no such chemistry between anybody in Attack. I’ll admit it’s unfair to compare Stanley Kramer’s epic
comedy filled to the brim with comic geniuses who honed their talents for years
with a film put together by a group of movie fans who wanted to make a film. To
be fair, Attack probably was designed
to play at drive-ins where people had other things on their mind besides a
movie. And who can blame them? If you had to watch this film, you would do
better off filing your nails.

I
won't hold it against you if you're a fan of this film as I have my share of
guilty pleasures, and if you are a
fan then this DVD/Blu-ray is an absolute must-have. The restored, 4K transfer
is very colorful and the film has never looked batter. The 2003 DVD release had
several extras that have been ported over to this new release, and I will also
list the extras that for some reason fell by the wayside. I would love to see
half the number of extras lavished upon this film bestowed upon some of my
favorite and lesser-known films that I grew up watching. For a film of this
kind, the new DVD/Blu-ray combo set from MVD is jam-packed. It would have been nice if
they included a hilarious cut of the film itself!

This
has been a good year for fans of model and actress Laura Gemser. Recently, Severin
Films released a deluxe Blu-ray package of two of her films, a soundtrack CD, a
really cool t-shirt and an enamel pin, the last item appearing to be something
that is new and all the rage nowadays. We’ll take a look at the two films
featured in this collection.

Emanuelle
and the Last Cannibals
(1977)

Laura
Gemser, the high cheekbone-chiseled, dark-skinned Indonesian goddess born
Laurette Marcia Gemser who appeared opposite Jack Palance in Emmanuelle
and the Deadly Black Cobra
(1975), returns in Emanuelle and the Last
Cannibals as Emanuelle. Here she’s a photojournalist who goes undercover at
a mental hospital with a 35mm camera hidden within a creepy children’s doll
that takes photos when the eyes open and close. She’s looking to expose the
hospital’s treatment of the infirmed and witnesses a horrific event wherein a
patient tries to eat one of the nurses. Yes, you read that right. A tattoo on
the patient’s torso of a cannibal tribe’s logo stuns Emanuelle. She comes to
find out that the woman was raised by a tribe of cannibals called the Apiaca. Eager
to pursue this story, she consults with her newspaper editor, an older man who
is looped so poorly you practically never see his mouth move. In fact, the
whole movie is looped with foley effects and dialogue that all sound so
unnatural but hey, that’s part of the fun of these movies. The story compels
Emanuelle to seek out Dr. Mark Lester (Ms. Gemser’s late real-life husband,
Gabriele Tinti) who agrees to accompany her on a journey to investigate the
Apiaca. Before she leaves on her trip, however, she decides to make love to her
boyfriend in full view of the New York skyline, but this is the last we see of
him as she appears to be smitten with the older Dr. Lester. Mechanical and
joyless softcore sex scenes proliferate, even after the point following their
arrival in the jungle to pursue the tribe. They are offered assistance by a
group of others who go with them: Reverend Wilkes (Geoffrey Copleston),
Isabelle (Mónica Zanchi), an overly emotional Sister Angela (Annamaria
Clementi), Donald Mackenzie (Donald O’Brien), and his wife Maggie (Nieves
Navarro). They are on a mission to locate Father Morales who is supposedly the
only person not from the Amazon who has ever had any contact with the tribe. Unfortunately,
they only discover his remains, which sets poor Sister Angela into a terrible
emotional state.

Poor
Donald can’t seem to satisfy Maggie anymore, so when they stop to make camp she
elects to get it on with natives in the jungle. As one would expect from director
Aristide Massaccesi, better known as Joe D’Amato, the sex scenes are overdone,
artificial and completely lacking in passion. Even Emanuelle’s multiple romps
do little to exult in the wonder of her lithe figure. If ever there was an
award for Best Mechanical and Robotic Sex Scene, director D’Amato would surely
win every time.

Naturally,
the more the group hikes further into the jungle the more they expose
themselves to potentially being captured and eaten. This horrific fate befalls several
of the party, but Emanuelle thinks of an ingenious way to escape once they are surrounded.
The ending is silly and predictable, but you pretty much know what you’re
getting with this acting troupe.

As
difficult as it may seem to believe, cannibal films enjoyed a high level of
popularity back in the 1970s and 1980s, so it was inevitable that they would
make their way into other genres. If the title is unfamiliar to U.S. audiences,
it should be. Though shot in the summer of 1977, Last Cannibals didn’t make its way to American shores until 1984
when it was dumped on VHS under the title of Trap Them and Kill Them. Like most exploitation films of the
period, some of the action is shot in the streets of New York City and it’s a
real hoot to see what Manhattan looked like 41 years ago. One shot has the
comedy Kentucky Fried Movie displayed
prominently on the marquee of the long-gone Rivoli Theatre which was known for
its extended showcases of 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968) and Jaws (1975).

The film has just made its way to Blu-ray via
of Severin Films and the results are so far above what we’re used to from VHS
bootlegs that it looks like a different movie. Presented
in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and given a 2K transfer from a good
print that significantly brightens up the image, Last Cannibals looks good enough to make one dump the inferior and
murky VHS bootlegs of over thirty years ago.

This
disc has an unusual amount of extras for this sort of title. Up first is The World of Nico Fidenco which runs
twenty-seven minutes. Signor Fidenco is the film’s composer and he has written
an upbeat score for the film. He’s very interesting to listen to and describes
how his stint in the military got in the way of his original ambition which was
to be a film director. After he was discharged, he learned the guitar and
studied singing and this led him to composing music for film. He collaborated
multiple times with director D’Amato. (Note:
if you’re a fan of the score, the first 3000 Blu-ray pressings in a special
edition contain a separate compact disc of the score. The end of this review
will fill you in on how to order it).

A Nun Among the Cannibals: An Interview with Actress Annamaria
Clementi (twenty-three minutes). While watching the interview, I couldn’t
believe that the woman speaking to the camera was the same woman who played Sister
Angela in the film. She was roughly twenty-three when she shot the film, and is
now sixty-five(?!) in the on-screen interview. This bespectacled beauty could
easily pass for thirty-eight. Perhaps the interview was shot years ago? It
looks new to me. She talks about how shy and aloof she was with lead actress
Gemser, and how director D’Amato wanted to put her in his next seven films which
she declined(!), as well as a chance encounter with Robert DeNiro when shooting
in New York City. She also explains that she was approached by Pino Pellegrino,
the man who would become her agent, casually on the street and he asked her if
she wanted to become an actress. Remarkably, she trusted him and they had a
good working relationship.

Dr. O’Brien MD: This eighteen-minute interview with Donald
O’Brien who played Donald Mackenzie reveals how he got his start in acting,
like most performers do, in the theatre. I was amazed at how much he had aged
whereas the aforementioned Annamaria Clementi looked so much younger.

From Switzerland to the Mato Grosso runs nearly nineteen minutes and
features Monika Zanchi whom genre fans will remember from the nutso 1977 outing
Hitch Hike with Franco Nero and the
incomparable David Hess. She also appeared in the ridiculous Spielberg spoof Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind
(1978).

The
last featurette is called I Am Your Black
Queen which runs just over eleven minutes and is a poorly-recorded
audio interview with Laura Gemser which is subtitled. She talks about how she
began, like most attractive young actresses do, by modelling. This is how genre
favorite Caroline Munro got her start. Her first film, Free Love, was released in 1974. Perhaps not so surprisingly, she
refers to her embarrassment over her nude scenes. Of the few movies that I have
seen of her, she rarely if ever looks comfortable in her own skin, almost as if
disrobing is a chore.

Last
of all is the requisite theatrical trailer.

As
I mentioned earlier, the first 3000 copies of this Blu-ray also include a
soundtrack CD of the film’s score. The running time on the 31-track CD is one
hour. It can be ordered here as part of The Laura Gemser Deluxe Bundle which includes a second film, Violence in a Women’s Prison.

In the
summer of 1992 I visited a neighborhood thrift store that rented obscure videos
of movies made all over the world. Foreign films on laserdisc imported from
Japan were transferred to VHS and rented long before “online downloading” became
a household term. One of the films was relatively new yet unfamiliar to me
although the cover art featured actress Jennifer Connelly on it. I already knew
of her from her roles in Dario Argento’s Phenomena
(1985), Seven Minutes in Heaven
(1985), Labyrinth (1986), Some Girls (1988), and The Hot (yowzah) Spot (1990), but this title looked quite different. Etoile, the French word for “star”, is
the title of director Peter Del Monte’s relatively unknown and overlong 1989
dramatic thriller that easily calls to mind Darren Aronofsky’s superior Black Swan (2010) due to its theme of a
troubled ballerina. I would almost consider Etoile
to be a “lost” Jennifer Connelly film in that most people are unaware of it. Even
this video tribute to her
on Youtube skips it completely. Although Italian and filmed in spoken
English, the film was not released in either Italy or the United States. Ms. Connelly, who premiered at the age of twelve in Sergio
Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America
(1984) as a dancer, plays Claire, a New York-based ballerina visiting Budapest
to audition for Swan Lake. Like in
the opening of Phenomena, her
character is arriving in a foreign land by way of aviation and finally by taxi.
She bumps into a fellow New Yorker named Jason (Gary McCleery) after dropping
her slipper in the hotel she is staying at. He’s instantly smitten with her,
and who wouldn’t be? At just seventeen, Ms. Connelly is utterly breathtaking. The
ballet school is run by Marius Balakin (Laurent Terzieff, who bears a striking
resemblance to Pierre Clementi for those Bertolucci fans of you out there). Claire
ventures out into an old, decrepit theater and dances alone until she locks
eyes with Balakin who is sitting in a seat, looking around at the theater. She
bolts. In the meantime, Jason is learning the antiques business from his Uncle
Joshua (an unlikely Charles Durning), but cannot stop thinking about Claire and
sneaks off, accompanying her on a sojourn to an abandoned old house that used
to belong to a ballerina who danced in Swan
Lake. Compelled to succeed, Claire decides to audition.

At
this point the film takes a turn into seemingly supernatural territory when
Claire finds flowers delivered to her room and addressed to “Natalie”. Despite
her best efforts, she cannot locate anyone else in the hotel with that name. In
the middle of the night, she receives a visit from her teacher’s choreographer
and another dancer; understandably freaked out, she then decides to return to
New York. While at the airport, a P.A. page for a one “Natalie Horvath” sends
her into a trance and she almost willingly assumes the “role” of this person
and transforms into a ballerina, with no memory of Claire, her former self. Jason
locates her sitting by a lake and is hurt and bewildered by her demeanor and
failure to recognize him. Determined to get to the bottom of this, he goes to
great lengths to uncover this very obvious transformation that he is powerless
to explain let alone comprehend.

Director
Peter Del Monte’s best-known film to Americans is indubitably Julia and Julia, the 1987 Sting-Kathleen
Turner outing that was touted as the first film to be shot in high definition
(it was later transferred to 35mm for theatrical exhibition). The premise of
that film also called into mind the sanity of the protagonist, however here
Claire merely appears to be a confused and unwilling participant in a world
that simply pulls her into it. Although Claire and Jason’s love story isn’t
very compelling, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him and ended up rooting
for him. The ending is trite, even by the director’s own admission, which he
found unsatisfying. Jurgen Knieper, the film’s composer who has done some
wonderful work for Wim Wenders, provides a very effective and haunting score
that remained with me days after seeing the film, in particular the main theme.
The cinematography is also quite stellar as Acácio de Almeida’s camera reveals much
more than the laserdisc ever showed, mostly because this new transfer to DVD is
made from a new 2K scan of the original film elements with extensive color
correction performed. The image is framed at 1.85:1.

The
DVD from Scorpion has several extras. First up is an eighteen-minute interview with the
film’s director who discusses the challenges that he was forced to deal with
while making the film. He took the job as the producer gave him an advance,
which is something that he never had before. However, there were many
disagreements regarding the film’s tone, etc.

The
second extra is an on-screen interview with the film’s executive producer, Claudio
Mancini, who has far less positive things to say about the cast and the whole
experience. This runs just shy of ten minutes.

The
final section contains trailers for the following films: Etoile (1989), Barbarosa
(1981), City on Fire (1979), Steaming (1985), and Ten Little Indians (1974).

I
would recommend Etoile wholeheartedly
to Jennifer Connelly completists.

The
technology that we all know and use today has become so ingrained in our
everyday lives that it’s virtually impossible to recall how we all survived
without them. Cell phones, portable computers, tablets, realistic-looking video
games, Global Positioning Systems, and access to extensive news media on a
24/7/365 basis were pipe dreams just twenty years ago. The computing power that
we all take for granted now started somewhere,
but most of the present-day users of techno gear weren’t even zygotes when the
home computer revolution was just getting off the ground. Yours truly was there
when my mother’s uncle worked for the federal government. He was the first to
get the really cool gadgets, mostly because he had the disposable income to
spend on them. I recall being in his basement in 1977 and playing Atari’s Pong
and being wowed by it. I was thrilled to watch movies on Wometco Home Theater
(WHT) on his rear-projection TV that he built out of a Heathkit two years later.
My mother’s second cousin had the Tandy/Radio Shack TRS‑80 Model I
in 1978. Santa Claus delivered an Atari 2600 to me in 1981 (one of the most
frustrating aspects of owning one would unquestionably be that the actual 8-bit
games themselves couldn’t live up to the excitement depicted on the cover
artwork). I was given a TRS-80 Coco (Color Computer) II in early 1984 and wrote
programs in BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). In 1989 I
did desktop publishing in Pagemaker on an Apple Macintosh SE. In 1995 I purchased
a 100MHz Pentium Packard Bell IBM-compatible computer. Where did all of these
electronic gadgets come from?

Tomaso
Walliser’s8-Bit Generation: The Commodore Wars is an entertaining and informative
documentary that attempts to answer that question. However, it really feels
geared towards those like myself who are in the know. I do feel, however, that
anyone who isn’t would not only be
lost but ultimately frustrated by this film as it assumes familiarity with its
subject which it tackles with rapid-fire editing and has an annoying habit of accentuating
the onscreen interviews (depending upon the subject being discussed) with strains
of Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the
Mountain King and Richard Strauss’s Also
Sprach Zarathustra overused to the point of annoyance.Those shortcomings
aside, it’s also an insightful look at how modern business is conducted (that
is, cutthroat) and how the dominant factor in just about every business decision
boils down to two syllables: “money” (and sometimes, “revenge”).

The
film, which was shot between 2010 and 2012, primarily focuses on Jack Tramiel,
an Auschwitz survivor who saw the darkest side of humanity but was lucky enough
to come out of it. His success as a business man following his liberation from
the camp is a testament to his human spirit, business acumen and tenacity. He
went from selling reconstructed typewriters to calculators to personal
computers. Through interviews with Mr. Tramiel and many colleagues who worked
with him and for him, we learn about the founder of Commodore International, the
company that produced The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic
Transactor), the Commodore VIC-20, and the Commodore 64. I never owned any
of these computers, but the story behind their inception, rousing and
unprecedented success and ultimate failure is very intriguing. In addition to
Mr. Tramiel, we hear from his son Leonard, MOS Tech engineer Chuck Peddle, Nolan Bushnell (the founder of Atari), Commodore engineer Bil Herd (who also
narrates), and a whole slew of others too numerous to list.

The
fact that this film about hi-tech is available only DVD and not Blu-ray is not
lost on me and is quite ironic. DVD is now looked upon by some as a legacy
technology despite being around for 21 years, not unlike the very systems
depicted and discussed in the film itself. If you are interested in seeing it,
you would do well to read this next bit of info very carefully prior to making
a decision. The film is available in three different varieties:

-
Available here on DVD on Amazon.com (which has a 14-minute TEDx Talk Segment with Leonard Tramiel that can also be seen here on Youtube). Kino
Lorber has put together a very professional package for this release.

- Available as a high definition download in a deluxe edition
at this link with many extras not on the DVD.

-
Available as a high definition download in a Jack Tramiel edition at this link which contains everything in the
deluxe edition, plus a one-hour interview with Mr. Tramiel.

A Summer Story is the unassuming title of a classy
and ultimately emotionally wrenching romantic drama of class differences set in
Great Britain in the early 1900’s. Originally released in the United States in
the summer of 1988 in a small number of theaters, the film is an adaption of John
Galsworthy’s 1916 short story “The Apple Tree” which was also made into two
separate radio programs over forty years earlier: Lady Esther Almanac on CBS in 1942 and Mercury Summer Theatre in 1946. Obviously the source material
proved to be palatable enough to audiences to warrant adaptations in both the
aural and visual spectrums. Director Piers Haggard, known for more sinister
fare such as The Blood on Satan’s Claw
(1971) and Venom (1981), directs from
the late Penelope Mortimer’s adapted screenplay.

Frank
Ashton is played by James Wilby, who was coming off the heels of Maurice (1987) and A Handful of Dust (1988) at the time. Ashton (changed from Ashurst
in the short story) arrives at a farm in the summer of 1922 with his wife who goes
off to look for a view to paint. He approaches a dilapidated fence alone with
hesitation and remembrance in a voiceover that can be best described as perfunctory,
much like Rupert Frazer’s ill-executed explanation to the audience concerning
the secret of his bride in Gordon Hessler’s unfairly under-rated The Girl in a Swing (1989). This is a
great misstep right out of the gate, or wet gate, given the film’s transfer
from what appears to be a near-mint theatrical print. The sequence would have
made the film’s denouement resonate even more than it does if Ashton were given
the gift of conveying his emotions by simply exuding them in a wordless opening
scene. The obvious emotion would have sufficed to have been accentuated by the
lush and poignant strains of Georges Delerue’s violins. It’s so out of place,
in fact, that I have a hard time believing that it could have come out of Ms.
Mortimer’s typewriter rather than a last-minute-urging of a studio executive
following a Q-and-A of a sneak preview, the result of cinematically illiterate audience
members wondering what the opening sequence even means. A slow dissolve takes
us to a period nearly twenty years earlier when Frank and a friend stumble upon
the very same gate and farm. A misstep over the gate leaves Frank with a
twisted ankle and a need to convalesce in the abode of the farm’s owners, under
the caring eye of their farm girl, Megan David (Imogen Stubbs), who is desired
by Joe, the farmhand (Jerome Flynn, Game
of Thrones’s Bronn). Her aunt (Susannah York) puts Frank up in a guest room
for a decent price but it isn’t long before Megan and Frank begin eyeing each
other. Frank meets up with Megan at a sheep-shearing festival. Eventually they
make love, read poetry upon a hilltop, and it isn’t long before Joe and Frank
come to blows. Frank makes a decision in an effort to be together that will
forever change Megan’s life.

The
film benefits enormously from the exceptional acting by all of those involved
as it tells the story of people who behave in an orchestrated and proper
manner, only to have their human emotions boil over when their true wants and
desires are threatened. The set design is quaint and colorful, with Lyncombe
Farm in Exmoor National Park in Dulverton, Somerset, England being where the
bulk of the action takes place.

The
U.S. theatrical exhibition of A Summer
Story committed a faux pas so
egregious in nature I felt it was borderline sacrosanct. The carefully
orchestrated main theme of the film which was supposed to play over the end
credits was instead jettisoned for the Moody Blues’s new song at the time, I Know You’re Out There Somewhere. How audiences
didn’t regurgitate and burn down the Village’s Quad Cinema, I’ll never know.

Now
available from the fine folks at Kino Lorber, this new Blu-ray release
mercifully reinstates the late Mr. Delerue’s glorious theme over the end
credits, righting the wrong enacted upon this lovely film thirty years ago. The
soundtrack album from 1988, long out of print, is now available again in a
significantly expanded edition from Music Box Records that can be ordered here from Screen Archives. The Blu-ray image
is touted as a “brand new 2017 scan of the original vault elements”. As there
is no mention of a 2K restoration, I’m assuming that this is 1080P, and the
result is the best that the film has looked since its theatrical exhibition,
easily besting all previous home video incarnations (the VHS version retained
the inharmonious Moody Blues tune). The Blu-ray’s sole extra is a section of no
less than seven trailers for the following films: Conduct Unbecoming (1975), Etoile
(1989), The Salamander (1981), Trouble Bound (1993), The Last Seduction (1994), Aloha,
Bobby and Rose (1975), and Steaming
(1985). Curiously, the trailer for A
Summer Story is not included. However, it can be seen here on Youtube.

The
long-gone Carnegie Hall Cinema in New York showed A Summer Story, and even featured a classy diorama in one of the
windows, depicting a scene from the film. Beautiful. Moviegoing in New York is
a lost art, a thing of the past…

Laura
Gemser is an actress known to very few moviegoers in the States nowadays. In
the 1970s and 1980s, however, she was well-known for her Emanuelle series, which followed the better-known Silvia Kristel Emmanuelle variety, the difference
between both women being the exclusion of one “m” in the title. Emmanuelle and the Deadly Black Cobra is
a 1976 effort by Joe D’Amato, the man responsible for many other entertaining
European trash films (I use that as a term of endearment). Unlike Ms. Gemser’s
past Emanuelle films, this one is a
curiosity as it inexplicably has two “m’s” and is really just an excuse to dangle
the director’s lithe leading lady in front of the camera in various stages of
undress. The plot, if you can even call it such, is really rather silly.

Ms.
Gemser stars as Eva, an exotic nightclub dancer in Hong Kong whose seductive
and topless moves with a Python catch the eye of Judas Carmichael (Jack
Palance) who is with his brother and businessman
Julius (Gabriele Tinti, Ms. Gemser’s real-life husband). Judas is a significantly older gentleman (by forty-four
years) who is captivated by Eva’s Indonesian beauty. He attempts to intrigue her
by introducing her to his love of reptiles, specifically snakes (Fellini
jump-cut anyone?). Following a brief lunch the next day, Judas invites Eva to
his home to see his snake collection, which she initially refuses to do. It
isn’t long before the oogling ophiophilist’s charms work on Eva and she agrees
to live with him following his desire to lavish her with money and presents. Eva
likes ladies, too, and she meets Candy (Ziggy Zanger). Another woman, Gerri (Michele
Starck), takes her to a club frequented by lesbians. Meanwhile, Julius is up to
no good. He becomes jealous of the women and puts a nasty plot in motion to
teach “them a lesson”.

Like
many other exploitation films of the era, Emmanuelle
and the Deadly Black Cobra has been released under various other titles: Eva Nera (Black Eva) and Black Cobra
Woman. Don’t be confused, these titles are one in the same film. In typical
exploitation fashion, the film is replete with bad dubbing and stilted
performances but let’s face it, we’re not watching Edward Albee here. The
target audience of this flick is young men and the women on display are a sight
to behold despite their unorthodox stage names: “Ziggy Zanger” and “Michele
Starck” are strange monikers to be sure and they only really serve as eye
candy, the former’s character’s namesake a deliberate tongue-in-cheek maneuver.
The character of Julius is a curiosity as we never really know what his deal
is. He meets a terrible end (and I do mean “end” which, mercifully, takes place
off camera). The late-great Mr. Palance is sufficient as the playboy/rich man
who is visibly taken with Eva. She, in turn, is pursued by an Asian man who is
shattered when his attempts to possess her ultimately fail.

Piero Umiliani provides a musical score that
is pleasant to the action onscreen, especially in the dance-with-the-snake and
girl-on-girl sequences that passed for high eroticism over forty years ago. The
interiors were shot in the old Elios Studios in Rome and exteriors were shot in
Hong Kong and the city is featured prominently, roughly twenty years before the
British government would transfer the sovereignty of Hong Kong over to China in
1997.

The film has recently made its way to Blu-ray
via of Code Red and Kino Lorber and the results are spectacular. Presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and
given a 1080p transfer, Emmanuelle and the Deadly Black Cobra looks
light years ahead of any past dark VHS bootlegs that circulated through the
mail and in video stores back in the 1980s.

Mirek Lipinski, the film’s writer, provides
an interesting feature-length commentary which discusses both the onscreen
action as well as interesting behind-the-scenes tidbits involving the nature of
the film business at the time and the relationships among the performers in the
film.

Laemmle’s
Royal Theatre in Los Angeles will be presenting a 45th anniversary
screening of Francois Truffaut’s 1973 film Day
for Night.The 115-minute film,
which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and known in its
native France as La Nuit américaine (The American Night), stars Jacqueline
Bisset, Valentina Cortese, Dani, Alexandra Stewart, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean
Champion, Jean-Pierre Léaud and François Truffaut and has been referred to as the most beloved film ever made about
filmmaking. It will be screened on Thursday, May 10, 2018 at 7:30
pm.

PLEASE NOTE: At press time, Actress Jacqueline
Bisset is scheduled to appear in person for a discussion about the film
following the screening.

From
the press release:

Part of our Anniversary Classics series. For details, visit: laemmle.com/ac.

DAY FOR NIGHT

Part of our Anniversary Classics
series. For details, visit: laemmle.com/ac.

DAY FOR NIGHT (1973)

45th Anniversary Screening

Thursday, May 10, at 7:30
PM at the Royal Theatre

Q&A follows with
Actress Jacqueline Bisset

Laemmle Theatres and the
Anniversary Classics Series present a 45th anniversary screening of Francois
Truffaut’s valentine to moviemaking, 'Day for Night,' which won the Academy
Award for best foreign language film of 1973. The following year, the picture was
nominated for three additional Oscars—best director for Truffaut, best original
screenplay by Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, and Suzanne Schiffman, and best
supporting actress Valentina Cortese. The film won awards in those three
categories from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of
Film Critics.

David Sterritt of TCM praised the picture as “the most beloved film ever made
about filmmaking,” and few would disagree with that assessment. Truffaut
himself plays a beleaguered director trying to complete his latest film in the
south of France while he wrestles with budget and insurance problems,
temperamental star behavior, sexual shenanigans, and even an unexpected
accident. Jacqueline Bisset stars as the British actress hired to play the
leading role in “Meet Pamela.” Jean-Pierre Leaud, who had starred in Truffaut’s
very first feature, 'The 400 Blows,' and in several of his other films, plays
the insecure leading man. Jean-Pierre Aumont, Alexandra Stewart, Dani, and
Nathalie Baye round out the cast. Acclaimed novelist Graham Greene has a cameo
role as an insurance agent.

Cortese has perhaps the
most memorable role as an aging actress who has trouble remembering her lines.
At the 1974 Oscar ceremony, the best supporting actress winner, Ingrid Bergman,
spent most of her acceptance speech praising the performance of Cortese for
creating a character that all actors could recognize. In addition to hailing
the performances, Roger Ebert said 'Day for Night' was “not only the best movie
ever made about the movies but… also a great entertainment.” Truffaut’s
favorite composer, Georges Delerue, provided the lushly romantic score.

Our special guest
Jacqueline Bisset has brightened movies and television for many years. Her
earlier films include 'Two for the Road,' 'Bullitt,' 'Airport,' 'Murder on the
Orient Express,' 'The Deep,' 'Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?,' John
Huston’s 'Under the Volcano,' George Cukor’s 'Rich and Famous' (which she also
produced), and Claude Chabrol’s 'La Ceremonie.' Bisset won a Golden Globe for
her performance in the TV miniseries 'Dancing on the Edge' in 2014.

The Royal Theatre is located at 11523 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
90025. The phone number is (310) 478 – 0401.

Swamp Thing (1982)
is a peculiar entry in the Wes Craven canon.
For a director who cut his teeth in porn (most directors began their
careers as editors in this field in the early 1970s) and directed such fare as The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Swamp Thing is a much gentler film. One of the few PG-rated entries to his credit,
it was made just a few years prior to his very own A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the movie that turned the horror film
industry on its ear with the introduction of Fred Krueger and which spawned one
of the most successful franchises in the genre.

Released on Friday, February 19, 1982 by the
late Joseph E. Levine’s long-defunct Embassy Pictures, Swamp Thing is a film version of the DC Comic that was created by
Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson. Set in
the swamps of Louisiana (though filmed in South Carolina), brother and sister
scientists Alec and Linda Holland (Ray Wise and Nannette Brown) are hard at
work on an experiment that is designed to create a plant and animal hybrid that
can withstand the extreme temperatures of various environments. Alice Cable (Adrienne Barbeau) works for the
government and makes a trip to the lab to see how things are coming along. Just as it appears that the government has
spent its money well, the henchmen of one sinister Dr. Anton Arcane (Louis
Jourdan), headed by the late cinema baddy David Hess, attempt to steal the written
magic formula and the serum from the clutches of its rightful owner. Linda is killed, and Alec gets doused with
the new concoction, ends up on fire (yes, that is stunt man Anthony Cecere running
outside engulfed in flames, a feat he
would repeat in A Nightmare on Elm Street)
and jumps into the swamp, reemerging as the titular creature who is henceforth
played by Dick Durock. Dr. Arcane believes that this serum will make him
immortal and he will therefore stop at nothing to make sure that he gets his
hands on the complete formula. Alice
begins to fall for Alec/Swamp Thing as she is eluding Dr. Arcane's machine gun-toting
minions. Mr. Hess, who appeared in the
aforementioned Last House, plays the
usual crazy, bullying nut job that he did so well in Hitch Hike (1977) and House
on the Edge of the Park (1980), and the supporting cast that surrounds him
are a terrific group of menaces. Reggie Batts nearly steals the film in his
turn as Judd, a young store proprietor who does everything he can to help Alice
avoid capture. There are various animated wipes, dissolves, and visual
transitions/segues that take you from one piece of action to the next in an
effort to emulate the look of a comic book. For the most part, the film succeeds.

Swamp Thing was
originally available on home video on capacitance electronic disc (CED),
laserdisc (LD), and the ubiquitous VHS cassette. Although it made its DVD debut in 2000, the
discs were pulled from the shelves when it was discovered that the DVD was
sourced from the international print which ran 93 minutes in length and contained
an additional two minutes of nudity that was not seen in the original 91-minute
PG-rated 1982 domestic theatrical exhibition. Bowing to some consumer complaints, MGM reissued the movie on DVD in
2005 in its original version, minus the nudity. It is this version that appears
on both the new DVD and Blu-ray. It would have been nice if the missing footage
had been included as an extra (if it is here as an Easter egg, kudos to those
of you who can find it!).

The transfer of the film is excellent; there
are a few spots and very small scratches here and there but nothing to distract
from your pleasure of watching the image. Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, is to be commended for
continually putting out our favorite genre films in these new versions with
top-notch extras. Best of all, this is a
DVD/Blu-ray combo. I don't know what the criteria is (or who the decision maker
is) when it comes to deciding to release a title in separate formats or as a
combo, but I sincerely wish that all of Scream Factory's titles were sold as
combos forthwith. That being said, both
formats boast excellent transfers, with Blu-ray obviously being the sharper and
clearer of the two.

There are some really nice extras on the
discs (which are presented equally on both formats). The movie contains two
separate full-length commentaries. The first is with writer/director Wes Craven
and it is moderated by Sean Clark of Horrors Hallowed
Grounds. Mr.
Clark is a walking/talking encyclopedia and asks Mr. Craven lots of interesting
and intelligent questions about the production and the people involved.

The second commentary is with makeup effects
artist William Munns, moderated by Michael Felsher of Red Shirt Pictures. This track is an absolute joy to listen to as
Mr. Munns remembers a great deal about the making of the film. Growing up in Studio City, CA, he speaks quite
eloquently about his experience in the film business prior to Swamp Thing, in addition to the issues
that began to flourish when the film was green-lighted. He recalls having to wait a long time as the
financing was secured, and even went to work on a film initially called Witch (later released as Superstition) in
the interim. Since the sex of the Swamp
Thing was an issue, he had to work around the anatomically correct creature and
his recollections are humorous in how this was handled (he says that the film
needed a PG-13 rating, however Swamp
Thing was shot in the summer of 1981 and this rating was not used until 1984
with the release of John Milius’ Red Dawn). He talks about fitting the suit, discusses
how the makeup crew became the scapegoat when filming came to a crawl due to
the other departments that were behind, the dangers of wearing the Swamp Thing
suit, the stunts that needed to be done, and how he took over as Swamp Thing
when Mr. Durock could no longer perform.

The bonus features consist of:

Tales from the Swamp is an
interview with Adrienne Barbeau. The
segment runs 16:56 and Ms. Barbeau is a delight to listen to. Jovial and funny,
she recalls the time that she spent on the film and talks about the bacteria
and parasites in the water, the long hours on the set while they were in South Carolina,
and the challenging elements around them. The original script that was given to
her by Wes Craven was far more audacious than what ended up on screen.
Unfortunately, just as the film went before the cameras, the production company
began to chip away the film's budget, necessitating constant rewriting during
the course of shooting and many concessions needed to be made. Ms. Barbeau is
rather candid and pulls no punches in explaining her disappointment with the
final product at the time, however she has developed an appreciation of the
film in the years since its release.

Hey, Jude is
the name of the second segment, and this is a fun and entertaining interview
with actor Reggie Batts who plays Jude (hence the name!). It runs 14:30. Mr. Batts explains how he got the role in the
film and was a fan of DC comics. Following
the release of Swamp Thing, he also appeared
in the North and South (1985) miniseries
on television.

The last segment is titled That Swamp Thing, and it’s a look back
with creator Len Wein who explains how he came up with the name for the
creature and how he got his start as an animator. The segment runs 13:19.

The original theatrical trailer is also
included, and this is in excellent condition, not the usual scratch-ridden mess
that we’re used to seeing.

The photo galleries consist of posters and lobby
cards; photos from the film; William Munn’s behind-the-scenes photos; and behind-the-scenes
photos by Geoffrey Rayle.

As an added bonus, the DVD/Blu-ray sleeve is
reversible and has the French poster artwork under the title of La Creature Du Marais, which translates
to “The Creature of the Swamp”.

In
March 1990, I paid a visit to my one and only source for all things foreign
horror. A small comic book hole-in-the-wall roughly half-an-hour from my house
was a New Jersey version of Stephen King’s Needful
Things. This store, long gone because of the Internet age, boasted VHS
bootlegs and imported foreign laser discs of uncut horror film titles I had only
read about in black and white fanzines written and printed by young adults.
This is where I saw the uncut version of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), a film that had
played theatrically seven years earlier in a horrifically butchered
eighty-minute version that removed some forty-five minutes of footage from an
already convoluted albeit brilliant film.

Another
movie that came to my attention at that time (despite having been released on
VHS here a year earlier, though I was unfamiliar with it) was the uncut edition
of Dick Maas’s 1988 thriller Amsterdamned,
which was shot on location in the Netherlands in the summer and fall of 1987. When I
put the VHS tape into my player I was presented with an image that was so dark,
so grainy, and so difficult to see that I had no choice but to shut it off
several minutes into it. I was disappointed because I had read that it was a
fairly decent movie. I never would’ve imagined at that time that it would take
me some twenty-seven years to see it. Thanks to the fine folks at Blue
Underground, Amsterdamned has now
been restored to its original glory and is available in a Blu-ray and DVD combo
pack. The result is a stellar 2K scan and high definition presentation of one
of the most enjoyable and intriguing thrillers that I have seen in quite some
time. While the story itself may not seem entirely fresh, the cinematic
execution is top-notch.

Amsterdamned is essentially an aquatically-themed
thriller concerning a scuba-diving lunatic stalking seemingly random folks in
the city of Amsterdam. The killer spends much of his time lurking about the
polluted canals of the titular city. The camera is kept at eye level (think
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws from 1975) as
he snakes through the water, his presence telegraphed by the bubbling and
gurgling of his oxygen tank and Darth Vader-like breathing which acts as a
harbinger of death for anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with him. After he
kills his first victim, an unfortunate prostitute from the infamous Red Light
District, a murder spree with no discernible motive is set into play. Eric
Visser (Huub Stapel) is the cop assigned to the case. He has a thirteen-year-old
daughter who is precocious and tries her best to help him along now that his
ex-wife is nowhere to be found. Much of the film revolves around Visser and his
partner chasing the killer through a series of “Damn, he got away again!” set-pieces, and while this may
sound boring and derivative, director Maas has a visual style that keeps things
tense, interesting and moving forward. There is a fairly elaborate canal chase
involving the killer and Visser in separate speed boats that is very well-mounted
and edited together that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Lewis Gilbert
mounted a similar chase in the James Bond film Moonraker (1979) and used rear projection for some of the close-ups
of Jaws (Richard Kiel), but director Maas does it all for real here, much like
the other predecessor in this arena, Geoffrey Reeve’s Puppet on a Chain (1971) which also set a boat chase through
Amsterdam’s canals.

Despite
being under the gun by his superiors to catch the killer, Visser manages to
find time to romance a scuba diver named Laura (Monique van de Ven) who is
jovial and cheerful and agrees to a date. Their passing fancy with one another comes
under close scrutiny from her friend and psychiatrist Martin Ruysdael (Hidde
Maas) who used to be a scuba diver (red flag!) but gave it up years ago. Visser
and Laura become closer and consummate their relationship. Laura becomes the
perfect damsel in distress towards the film’s end and despite the revelation of
the killer, Amsterdamned still
manages to pack a decent punch.

The
director also wrote the musical score (think John Carpenter) and it works very well
for the film. It exudes a definite air of tension. Amsterdamned boasts the best Jaws-inspired
underwater scare that pays homage to the Ben Gardner death from that film. It
ends with (what else?) an Eighties pop-tune called (guess!) “Amsterdamned”!

I’m a sucker for car chases. Not the
perfunctory, last-minute “Hey, this movie needs a car chase!” variety, but the
kind that comes as a result of a particular plot point wherein someone or some group has to get away from some other
group. While most new car chases such as TheFast and the Furious sort are usually
accomplished through CGI, I find that this sleight-of-hand fakery virtually
abolishes all tension. The best ones that I have seen all did it for real
through innovative and unprecedented filming techniques and excellent editing: Grand Prix (1966), Vanishing Point (1967), Bullitt
(1968), The Seven-Ups (1973), The Blues Brothers (1980), The Road Warrior (1981), The Terminator (1984), F/X (1986), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), and The Town (2010) all have action sequences that put the full wonder
of film editing on display.

There are two major car chases in the
late John Frankenheimer’s Ronin, which opened on Friday, September 25, 1998, and
it’s the second and longer one that ranks up there in the pantheon of The Greatest
Car Chases Ever Filmed. The French
Connection (1971) and To Live and Die
in L.A. (1985) are the granddaddies of car chases in my humble opinion and Ronin’s is certainly in the top ten,
with a stupendous wrong-way-driving-against-incoming-traffic sequence through a
tunnel in France to composer Elia
Cmiral’s exciting score.

The title of “Ronin” is originally a
reference to the feudal period of Japan relating to a samurai who has become
masterless following his master’s death as a result of the samurai’s failure to
protect him. To earn a living, the samurai wanders from place to place
attempting to gain work from others. For the uninitiated, title cards prior to
the film’s opening credits inform us of this. This name relates to the film as
several mercenaries meet for the purpose of stealing an important silver case.
Sam (Robert DeNiro), Vincent (Jean Reno), Gregor (Stellan Skarsgard), and Spence
(Sean Bean) and several others are the persons for hire. Deirdre (Natascha
McElhorne) is the one who called them all together but she offers little in the
way of an explanation as to what the contents are. Like in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), they don’t know
one another and work under the assumption that all involved are trustworthy
which eventually will be their undoing. Now ya see, if they has listened to the
James Poe episode “Blood Bath” on the old time radio show Escape!, none of this would have ever happened! Yeah…

Sam used to work for the CIA, Vincent
is a “fixer”, Spence is a former Special Air Service expert in weaponry, Gregor
is an expert in electronics, and Larry (Skipp
Sudduth) is one of the drivers. Sam is the most inquisitive and probably has
the most to lose. They don’t discuss their past and are eager to get paid. Sam almost
acts like the ringleader, but he has some serious competition after they secure
their objective and are double-crossed. It then becomes a game of who can trust
who (naturally, the answer is no one). There are some really good supporting
performances by Michael Lonsdale (I hadn’t seen him in a theater since Moonraker!) and Jonathan Pryce and the
action always keeps moving forward but unlike today’s films, the action
sequences are well-staged and edited and have depth to them. A terrific
addition to Mr. Frankenheimer’s filmography.

The
plot of Dario Argento’s 1985 thriller Phenomena
has long been the subject of ridicule and derision by critics and fans alike
since its initial release. The inevitable complaints about the film range from
the bad dubbing and stiff performances to the ludicrous notion that insects can
be employed as detectives in a homicide investigation (this is true and has
actually been done, providing the inspiration for the film). If the film does
not sound familiar, that could be attributed to the fact that Phenomena was severely cut by 33 minutes
and retitled Creepers when it opened
in the States on Friday, August 30, 1985.

Jennifer
Corvino (Jennifer Connelly) is a fourteen year-old student attending an
all-girls school in Switzerland while her movie star father is away for the
better part of a year shooting a film. Her mother, who left the family when
Jennifer was a child, is merely mentioned but never seen. Unfortunately, her
roommate Sophie (Federica
Mastroianni) has just informed her that the school is
beset by a killer who stalks girls their age and kills them. Well, that’s unfortunate! You would think that
someone would order the school closed and the girls sent away. As you can
imagine, this doesn’t sit too well with Jennifer who suffers from a bad case of
sleepwalking and manages to find herself embroiled in the very murders she was
hoping to avoid. She meets entomologist John McGregor (Donald Pleasence), a
wheelchair-bound Scot who lacks a Scottish accent but possesses an avuncular
disposition that endears Jennifer to him and his chimpanzee Inga who doubles as
his nurse. Fortunately for Jennifer, he is aiding the police in their
investigation into the murder of a Danish tourist (Fiore Argento, the
director’s eldest daughter) and the disappearance of McGregor’s former aid.
Together with the help of McGregor, Inga (yes, the chimp!) and a very large
fly, Jennifer sets off to locate the murderer. When she does, she nearly
regrets it.

Jennifer
Connelly was chosen by Mr. Argento to play the lead as he had seen her in
Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in
America (1984). His decision to set the film in the Swiss Alps is
unorthodox but provides the perfect backdrop to the story as the scenery is
utterly breathtaking. He also makes terrific use of the Steadi-cam and it never
feels over-used.

Phenomena has been released on home video more times than I can
count, but the new Blu-ray from Synapse Films is gorgeous and has completely
different extras than the 2011 Arrow Video release which had the more
well-known 110-minute cut and an array of then-newly-produced extras. Phenomena has more detractors than
admirers if you believe what you read, and even staunch proponents of Mr.
Argento’s vision (Maitland McDonagh and Alan Jones) have written off the film
as silly. However, the amount of love and dedication that has been lavished
upon this film restoring it to its former glory on Blu-ray says volumes about
those who cherish it. This set is absolutely beautiful and definitely worth the
price of an upgrade as it sports the following:

The
set comes with two Blu-rays which consist of three (3) different cuts of the
film, all available in high-definition for the first time ever in one
collector's edition package:

When
a film is as uninspired and as amateurishly made as Lance Lindsay’s Star Crystal (1986) is and ends with the
words “Filmed entirely in SPACE” following the end credits, you know that you’re
going to wish that you had those 93 minutes of your life back. Unfortunately, science
has not gotten us to the point where that is possible just yet. Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) was the
first low-budget Star Wars rip-off
that I saw theatrically and I was astonished at how unexciting it was. However,
it did give us James Cameron, Bill
Paxton, and James Horner so it wasn’t all
bad. Crystal, also a product of Roger
Corman’s low-budget production company, goes much further than Battle did in terms of “borrowing” from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Dark Star (1974), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Alien
(1979), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982),
The Thing (1982), Xtro (1983), and Lifeforce (1985). Released on VHS in April 1986, Crystal outright steals from these classic films. Crystal lives up to none of the exceptional movie artwork that was
used to promote it, which is a shame as the poster is probably the best thing
about it (though it hawks the action as taking place in 2035, not 2032 – is
there really a difference?), although it does have a fairly decent score by
Doug Katsaros.

In
the future, remember this is 2032 and not
2035!, two men on Mars extricate a rock from the planet’s surface and,
brilliantly, bring it on board the spacecraft. To think that these guys never
saw Ridley Scott’s Alien is a little
too much to believe. They have it analyzed by a scientist who determines that
it’s…a…rock. Yes, it’s a rock that leaks a mysterious white goo (no, I’m not going there…) which a crew member
sticks nearly their entire hand into out of curiosity. Apparently, they didn’t
see Larry Cohen’s The Stuff (1985)
either. It then begins to turn into a pitiful-looking alien. The rock turns
into some sort of crystal, and looks not unlike the titular Dark Crystal from
that superior film. These events cause the crew to die suddenly. Too bad it
didn’t have the same effect on the viewer. All the computers and onboard
spaceship equipment look like they were made by Radio Shack. The action (that’s
being kind) then flashes forward two months later when Colonel William Hamilton
is assigned to find out why the crew died. Maybe they watched the dailies and
committed suicide? An attractive blonde flirts with him in typical 80’s
fashion. Everyone on the ship has big 80’s hair, a true anachronism in 2032. Onboard
the ship (in reality a poorly-disguised shopping mall) is Roger Campbell (C.
Juston Campbell) and his right hand man who cracks unfunny jokes like “I’d
rather eat my shoe” when referring to the ship’s food. The ship begins shaking when
the cinematographer starts shaking it back and forth and crew members run
around frivolously. The shopping mall’s escalators are a hilarious prop.

I
could go on and on about this film, but I don’t want to ruin the special
awfulness of it for the viewer. I will say that the ending is particularly
silly and comes out of left field that features an anthropomorphized blob that
breathes deeply. The plot is picked out of many sci-fi films and the director
does what he can with the ludicrous material. It makes you wonder, however, if
the movie was originally written to be tongue-in-cheek or meant to be serious. Coca-Cola
appears in a product-placement moment, and the women on the ship are dressed in
outfits that make one half expect them all to break into calisthenics. It’s always
nice to have a blonde running around screaming, “We’re all gonna die!!” at the
first sight of outer space trouble. The gratuitous sex that was a mainstay of
such 80’s fare is completely missing from Star
Crystal and it makes one wonder who was the intended audience. Exactly ten
minutes into the film, a shot from within the mothership reveals a replica of
the Millennium Falcon flanking each side of the entrance. Really? Lucasfilm
signed off on this? May the Farce Be With You.

If
there is anything this film needs, it’s the Mystery Science Theater 3000
treatment. There is even the dreaded End Credits Song. Why do people think that we want a song at the end of movies like
this?

If
you’re a fan of this film (no judgment; to each his own), you’ll be happy to
know that Kino Lorber has provided a top-notch transfer of the film on Blu-ray.
This is the one to get!

High
school friends Enid Coleslaw (Thora Birch) and Rebecca Doppelmeyer (Scarlett
Johansson) absolutely cannot wait to be free of the prison of school, defiantly
flipping the bird and squashing their mortarboards following their graduation.
Enid isn’t off the hook just yet: her “diploma” is instead a note informing her
that she must “take some stupid art class” (her words) if she hopes to graduate.
Their fellow classmates are caricatures of everyone we all knew during our
adolescence. Melora (Debra Azar) is inhumanly happy all the time and oblivious
to Enid and Rebecca’s sense of ennui and contempt. Todd (T.J. Thyne) is
ultra-nervous to talk with the insouciant Rebecca at the punchbowl. Another bespectacled
student sits off by himself. Enid and Rebecca are at both an intellectual and
emotional crossroads. They want to share an apartment; however, they seem unaware
of the amount of money they will have to come up with for such a
venture. Instead of finding jobs, their post-graduation afternoons are spent
meandering through life while frowning upon society, following strange people
home, bothering their mutual friend Josh (Brad Renfro) and admiring the Weird
Al wannabe waiter at the new 50’s-themed diner which plays contemporary music.
Seemingly without a care in the world, the women have no plans to attend
college, preferring instead to prank an unsuspecting nebbish named Seymour (Steve
Buscemi) who has placed a personal ad in an attempt to communicate with a
striking blonde he noticed, with Enid feigning said blonde on Seymour’s
answering machine. Rebecca is a dour and solemn counterpoint to Enid’s aloof
yet occasionally jovial demeanor. If
Holden Caulfield had a girlfriend, she might be someone just like Enid,
sneering at the losers and phonies in her midst. Searching out Seymour, they
approach him and his roommate at a garage sale where he is unloading old
records for next to nothing. His affection for collecting 78 rpms begins to
endear him to Enid, who confides in Rebecca that she likes him despite their
25-year age difference. They have some truly funny moments together such as
attending a “party” for guys who talk techno mumbo-jumbo, riding in the car
together as Seymour screams at people walking through an intersection, and a
humorous romp through an adult video and novelty store.

Rebecca grows tired of hearing about Seymour,
and presses Enid to get a job but she only succeeds in getting fired repeatedly,
even from her position at the concession stand at a Pacific Theatre cinema when
she ribs the customers over their choice of movie and their willingness to eat
popcorn with “chemical sludge” poured on it. The tone of the film shifts from
one of comedic commentary on the world to one of disillusionment as Enid begins
to feel her world slowly begin to crumble around her. Her friendship with
Rebecca, an anchor in her life for years, is ending and like so many of us at
that age, she has no idea where her life is going or what she needs to be doing
when she isn’t changing her hair color or her now-famous blue Raptor t-shirt or
donning punk rock garb as a sartorial statement. Her summer art teacher
(Illeana Douglas) shows her students her personal thesis film Mirror, Father, Mirror which itself is a
parody of the pretentious student films submitted to professors. She pushes
Enid to create interesting and powerful art when Enid is only interested in
drawing the people she knows and Don Knotts. In short, nothing seems to be
going well for her. The only person she can rely on is Norman, the well-dressed
man who sits on a bench at a bus stop that stopped service a long time ago and
holds the key to the film’s long-debated denouement. Enid is almost like an
older version of Jane Burnham, the character portrayed by Ms. Birch in American Beauty (1999). In that film,
she barely reacted to her father (Kevin Spacey) and here her contempt for her
father (Bob Balaban) and his girlfriend Maxine (Teri Garr) is even more
perceptible.

Director Terry Zwigoff takes the source
material created by artist and writer Daniel Clowes and fashions one of the
most brilliantly entertaining and poignant ruminations on adolescence the
silver screen has ever seen. Ghost World
also boasts excellent use of music, much of it pre-existing, although the main
theme by David Kitay is an elegiac
piano theme that recalls David Shire’s theme to The Conversation (1974). The film starts with a bang to the
seemingly non-diegetic tune of the Mohammed Rafi hit “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” from
the 1965 Hindi film Gumnaam, the
scenes of which are intercut with images of the apartment complex’s
inhabitants. As the camera tracks from the exterior windows of these
grotesqueries, it settles upon Enid’s bedroom where the night before graduation
she dances to the aforementioned tune which we now see is being played back on a
bootleg VHS tape. The beat is frenetic and infectious. Enid, for the first of
only a handful of times in the entire film, appears to be in a state of joy as
she mimics the moves of the dancers. If only she could always feel this way! With this singular sequence, Mr. Zwigoff
achieves something reserved for only the greatest and rarest of filmmakers – re-identifying
a popular musical piece with his movie. I can’t hear “The Blue Danube” without
thinking of spaceships spinning throughout the galaxy.

Ghost World opened on Friday, July 20, 2001 in
limited release in New York and Los Angeles and garnered immediate critical
acclaim. Filmed in 2000, the film is a product of a simpler and more innocent
time. Before the brutal wake-up call of the September 11th attacks, there is a
complete lack of cell phone usage in the film. It makes a great companion to
2001’s other minor masterpiece of adolescent angst, the cult favorite Donnie Darko.

Richard
Rush’s 1967 film Hells Angels on Wheels
celebrates its 50th anniversary with a special screening at the Noho
7 Theatre in Los Angeles. Starring Adam Roarke, Jack Nicholson, Sabrina Scharf,
Jana Taylor and Jack Starrett, the film runs 95 minutes and is one of several
films that Mr. Rush directed Mr. Nicholson in, the others being Too Soon to Love (1960) and Psycho-Out (1968). This is a rare
opportunity to see this film on the big screen.

PLEASE NOTE: Director Richard Rush and
actress Sabrina Scharf are scheduled to appear in person for a Q & A
following the screening.

From
the press release:

HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS (1967)

Thursday, August 3, 2017 at 7:30 PM

A bunch of hairy guys on Harleys are causing trouble again in this, one of the
best-remembered examples of the biker flicks of the 1960's. Poet (Jack
Nicholson) is a moody gas station attendant who is looking for more excitement
in his life. When a gang of bikers roars through town, Poet is intrigued, and
after he pitches in to help the Hell's Angels in a bar fight (and pulls a
well-timed stick up), one of the gang's higher-ups, Buddy (Adam Roarke) asks
Poet to join. Soon Poet is riding with the Angels and living their lifestyle of
violent debauchery, but Poet begins to tire of their rootless decadence, and
Buddy is none too happy with Poet when he learns they're both in love with the
same woman. Hell's Angels On Wheels won a cult following for its agressive but
languid atmosphere and the fluid camerawork of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs
(at this point still billed as "Leslie Kovacs"). Richard Rush
directed, and legendary Hell's Angels leader Sonny Barger appears as himself.

The Noho 7 Theatre is located at 5240
Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601.
The phone number is (310) (310) 478 – 3836.

Mark Robson’s 1957 film Peyton Place celebrates its 60th
anniversary with a special screening at the Royal Theatre in Los Angeles. The
film, which runs 157 minutes, stars Lana Turner, Lee Philips, Lloyd Nolan,
Arthur Kennedy, Russ Tamblyn, Terry More, and Hope Lange.

PLEASE
NOTE: Actress Terry Moore is currently scheduled to appear at the screening as
part of a Q & A regarding the film and her career.

From the press release:

Part
of our Anniversary Classics series. For details, visit: laemmle.com/ac.

PEYTON PLACE (1957)
60th Anniversary Screening
Wednesday, July 12, at 7:00 PM at the Royal Theatre
Q & A with Co-Star Terry Moore
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 60th anniversary
screening of 'Peyton Place,' the smash hit movie version of Grace Metalious’s
best-selling novel. The film earned nine top Academy Award nominations,
including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It also
tied the all-time record of five acting nominations from a single film: Lana
Turner as Best Actress and four supporting nods, for newcomers Diane Varsi and
Hope Lange, along with Arthur Kennedy and Russ Tamblyn.

Metalious’s novel exposed the steamy shenanigans in a small New England town,
and even in a slightly toned-down version, the film tackled such once-forbidden
topics as rape, incest, sexual hypocrisy and repression. It opened in December
of 1957 and became the second highest grossing film of 1958 after going into
wide release and then spawned a sequel and a popular TV series in the 1960s.

Leonard Maltin summed up the critical consensus when he wrote, “Grace Metalious’s
once-notorious novel receives Grade A filming.” Producer Jerry Wald (whose
credits included 'Mildred Pierce,' 'Key Largo,' 'Johnny Belinda,' 'An Affair to
Remember,' 'The Long Hot Summer,' and 'Sons and Lovers') bought the rights to
the novel for $250,000 and hired a first-rate team to bring it to the screen.
Screenwriter John Michael Hayes wrote many of the best Alfred Hitchcock movies
of the 1950s, including 'Rear Window,' 'The Trouble with Harry,' and 'The Man
Who Knew Too Much.' Director Mark Robson started as an assistant editor on
Orson Welles’ 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Magnificent Ambersons,' then directed
such successful films as 'Champion,' 'The Bridges at Toko-Ri,' and 'Inn of the
Sixth Happiness.' Oscar winning composer Franz Waxman provided the memorable
score.

The Hollywood Reporter praised
all the performances but singled out co-star Terry Moore, who “shows what a
forceful and moving actress she can be.” Moore made a vivid impression in
1949’s 'Mighty Joe Young,' then earned an Oscar nomination for 'Come Back,
Little Sheba' in 1952. Her other films include 'Man on a Tightrope' with
Fredric March, 'King of the Khyber Rifles' with Tyrone Power, 'Beneath the
12-Mile Reef' with Robert Wagner, and 'Daddy Long Legs' with Fred Astaire and
Leslie Caron. She made 77 feature films over the course of her career and also
appeared in many TV series and movies.

The
Royal Theatre is located at 11523 Santa Monica Blvd. 11523 Santa Monica Blvd., Los
Angeles, CA 90025. The phone number is (310) 478 – 0401.

Walt Disney’s Bambi, which opened on Friday, August 21, 1942 at Radio City Music
accompanied by a live stage show, is an indisputable animated masterpiece based
upon Felix Salten’s 1923 novel of the same name. The story of a young fawn
growing up in the woods with his mother and cute animals in his midst, ty Bambi is not the sort of film that one
would normally associate with the Walt Disney name. As children, we are
introduced to the requisite characters who are synonymous with Disney and
labeled as “family entertainment” such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, either
through television viewings, theatrical rereleases or VHS/laserdisc/DVD/Blu-ray
viewings. The overall general attitude of a Disney film is one of fun and joy,
although there are exceptions as some movies, such as Pinocchio (1940) and The
Rescuers (1977), have moments that are emotionally dark. Bambi is no traditional Disney movie,
and dare I say it’s a film that parents of very young and impressionable
children should honestly think twice about before permitting them to view it,
as introducing the notion of death to a youngster through a cartoon may prove
to be a life-changing event (to say nothing of the constant images of violence
that children are subjected to on television and on the Internet each day).

Bambi experiences the many things in
life that children experience: meeting and taking a liking to new friends
(Thumper the rabbit proves a good companion and teacher and a fellow fawn named
Faline proves to be a fun female friend) and making honest mistakes (labeling a
skunk “Flower” of all things). He is very close to his mother, but does not
realize that the Great Prince of the Forest, who protects the animals from Man,
specifically hunters, and is both revered and feared by the animals, is his real
father. His fortitude is tested when his mother is killed by the hunters and
his father reveals his identity to him. Bambi realizes that to survive one must
be strong.

As the years go by, Bambi matures,
grows up and adapts to the environment. He now views the equally older Faline
as a potential romantic mate, and wards off a fellow buck, Ronno, who competes
for her affections. His childhood friends also find their own romantic mates,
and Bambi and Faline are blessed with twins as Bambi becomes the new Great
Prince of the Forest. As they said in 1994’s The Lion King, the circle of life.

Cheech
and Chong’s Next Movie, which opened on Friday, July 18,
1980, had stiff competition at the box office: Airplane!, The Empire Strikes Back, The Shining, Friday the 13th,
The Blue Lagoon, The Big Red One, Dressed to Kill, Fame, and The Blues Brothers were all in major
release at the time. While Next Movie
and did respectable business, it went on to gross even more moola when
Universal released is on a double bill with John Landis’s beloved Blues Brothers later. The film picks up
sometime after Cheech and Chong’s maiden cinematic outing, Up in Smoke, left off two years earlier. Written by the slapdash
and seemingly always high dynamic duo and directed by the latter of the two, Next Movie plays out like their comedy
album routines (“Dave” from their self-titled 1971 debut album is one of their
best-known and funniest bits) which is exactly how Abbott and Costello’s early
film appearances were scripted (in their case they were based on their radio
routines). Next Movie was shot in
1979 as evinced by the appearance of North
Dallas Forty and Being There on
Los Angeles movie marquees in the distance and concerns two struggling potheads
who go through a series of (mis)adventures while attempting to start a rock
band. They siphon gas out of a truck into a refuse-filled garbage can with
explosive results. They have an ongoing feud with their neighbor who is fed up
with their antics. Their house has been condemned and they find themselves at a
welfare office. Cheech’s girlfriend Donna (Evelyn Guerrero), one of the welfare
workers, has an off-screen tryst with him while Chong sits next to a very young
Michael Winslow who makes some truly funny sound effects that would make him so
popular later in seven Police Academy
movies. The scene goes on a bit too long, but it’s a great showcase for Mr.
Winslow’s considerable talents. Donna’s boss reprimands her for her momentary
lapse of reason under Cheech’s spell and they make a run for it. Later,
Cheech’s cousin Red (also played by Mr. Marin) blows into town and, while also
financially impecunious, fights with a hotel receptionist (Paul Reubens) who is
carted off by the cops while shouting Al Pacino’s famous “Attica! Attica!” mantra
and ends up jailed after assaulting the men.

The boys are then invited
to a party by a roller-skater (when was the last time you saw one of those
onscreen?) which takes place in a whorehouse in a sequence that elicits
laughter as Cheech watches and reacts to some action outside of one of the
rooms. They scare off the clients by playing back audio on a boombox that they
recorded earlier of the hotel altercation. This is a cute tactic that has
worked to comedic effect in everything from the aforementioned Abbott and
Costello to Johnny Depp in A Nightmare on
Elm Street (1984). The clients spill out onto Sunset Boulevard in a frenzy
and end up at the house of one of the girl’s parents, who are in a constant
state of hilarity, and the action moves to a comedy club wherein a fight breaks
out. Paul Reubens reappears here in a very early appearance as Pee-Wee Herman.
The film eventually ends with a strange bit of “far-out” silliness involving
pot, flying saucers and animation. The message of the film, if there is one, is
that “life’s a party”. If you’re a fan of the titular doofuses who are funny
and amiable, you’ll enjoy the film. Some of the episodes go on a little too
long and it makes one wonder if the filmmakers simply expected the audience to
be stoned while watching the film!

Like Shout! Factory’s
recent release of Universal’s Car Wash
(1976), Next Movie is a film that was
drastically altered for its television airing which included different scenes
and music. While it would have been nice to have had this alternate version on
the new Blu-ray, Cheech and Chong fans will appreciate the new and colorful
transfer which is much clearer than previous home video transfers. Shout!
Factory has done another bang-up job with the image looking very bright and the
colors vivid. Los Angeles, like New York at the time, had a look and feel and
character all its own which is now gone thanks to corporate America. The
brothel that they leave is on a street that has lost its integrity much like
the most memorable and colorful establishments that appear in Martin Scorsese’s
New York in Taxi Driver (1976).

The Blu-ray contains
these extras: a theatrical trailer, radio sports, and a roughly 20-minute
onscreen interview with Cheech Marin,who discusses the making of the film..

I
disliked Car Wash upon seeing it for
the first time On Demand several years ago and didn’t even make it all the way
through. Having grown up listening to Richard Pryor and George Carlin in the early
1980’s I had always wanted to see this film that showcased both of their
talents but could never seem to find it on television or on VHS in any of the
independent video stores that I frequented. The former West Coast Videos and
Blockbuster Videos were of no help either. Given the opportunity to see it On
Demand, I must have been in a different mindset as something about the film
must have rubbed me the wrong way, but a new viewing of it has changed my mind
completely.

Car Wash, which opened in theatres in New York City
on Friday, October 15, 1976 (remember the 8th Street Playhouse?), is
a delightfully funny slice of Los Angeles 1970’s craziness that looks at the
lives of a sizeable group of men who wash cars by hand for a meek owner, Mr.
B., played by the late great character actor Sully Boyer, the bank manager from
Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Mr. B. can’t
afford to install the automatic, machine-run equipment necessary to wash cars
more efficiently at the Dee-Luxe Car Wash (even a young boy sees through his
claim to have his workers do the washing by hand to give it that “personal
touch”) while, unbelievably, carrying on an extra-marital affair with Marsha,
the cute girl at the cash register (Melanie Mayron, who looks like she could be
the sister of adult film performer Sunny Lane). The main characters are the
washers themselves and we are introduced to them as they change in the locker
room and talk about the lives that they really want to be leading. One wants to
be a superhero, another two are a fairly good singing duo, and the angriest of
the lot calls himself Abdullah (Bill Duke) and wants to be anywhere but there
as he’s tired of the shenanigans. Lindy (Antonio Fargas of Starsky and Hutch) is a drag queen with a good heart and has some
of the best lines in this Joel Schumacher-scripted film.

As
the action progresses, we meet several clients who want only tip-top service.
Lorraine Gary from Jaws portrays an
inspired bit of Beverly Hills middle-age housewife hysteria who is in a hurry as
she speeds through the LA streets talking on a mobile car phone(!) with a young
son who can’t stop vomiting for reasons never explained. Kenny (Tim Thomerson)
catches Marsha’s eye and suavely hands her his business card. Another involves
a man recovering from a prostate operation and a bottle of urine that parodies
the ape throwing the bone into the sky in 2001:
A Space Odyssey. One of the stand-outs is Richard Pryor as Daddy Rich, a goofy
preacher who travels in luxury with an entourage that includes The Pointer
Sisters and spouts enough verbal puns to illustrate that not much has changed
between the days of snake oil salesmen and those “doing God’s work” while being
called out by Abdullah. His reaction after getting out of the limo (look fast
for the sophomoric TITHE on the license plate) for the first time when he gets
a look at Lindy is hilarious and priceless. The car wash even has Daddy Rich’s
photo mounted on a wall next to JFK and MLK. George Carlin also appears as a
loquacious taxi driver who boasts to a hooker/passenger (Lauren Jones) how much
he trusts people just as she quietly bolts from his cab without paying her
fare. He spends the rest of the film looking for her while she hangs around
right under his nose, completely unrecognizable in a different outfit. The
film’s episodic nature recalls Robert Altman’s style of filmmaking.

It’s
not all fun and games as the script takes an unexpected turn into serious
territory where it deals with Caucasian and African-American relations. One of
the washers is himself an ex-convict doing his best to stay on the straight and
narrow and provide for his children who greet him at work in a sweet and tender
scene. Later, he is nearly killed when a fired employee tries to rob the cash
register after hours. The incident is completely unexpected and deeply poignant
as the former promises to help the latter out of his situation as the would-be
robber emotionally breaks down.

Some
of the scenes would probably not be scripted like this had the film been made
today, and as of early 2016 there was a rumor that the film was being
considered for a remake. In 2001 a film called The Wash (not to be confused with the 1988 film of the same name) was
released and was directed by DJ Pooh and starred Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg that
took place at a car wash.

Barry
Levinson’s 1982 comedy Diner
celebrates its 35th anniversary (yikes!) with a special 35mm
screening at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre in Los Angeles. A highly revered
coming-of-age story directed by the man who helmed Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), Good
Morning Vietnam (1987), and Rain Man
(1989), Diner features and all-star
cast that includes Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon,
Tim Daly, Ellen Barkin, and Paul Reiser. The 110-minute film will be screened on
Saturday, June 10, 2017 at 7:30 pm.

PLEASE NOTE: Producer Mark Johnson and
actor Paul Reiser are scheduled to appear in person for a Q & A following
the screening.

From
the press release:

DINER (1982)

35th Anniversary Screening

Saturday, June 10, at 7:30 PM at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre

Followed by Q & A with Producer Mark Johnson

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 35th anniversary
screening of one of the best loved films of the 1980s, Barry Levinson’s
'Diner.' Levinson made his directorial debut with this feature set in his
native Baltimore in 1959, and he earned an Oscar nomination for best original
screenplay. The frequently uproarious comedy-drama, set to a rousing soundtrack
of hits from the period, follows a group of friends who hang out at their
favorite diner as they try to navigate the perilous path from adolescence to
adulthood. Long before 'Mad Men,' this film skewered the blatant sexism that
was rampant in the era.

The extraordinary cast, many of them new to movies, includes Steve Guttenberg,
Daniel Stern, Paul Reiser, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Tim Daly, and Ellen
Barkin. Levinson encouraged his cast to improvise, and their rapport helped to
electrify the film. Many of them went on to make an impressive mark in both
film and television over the next decades.Time’s Richard Corliss wrote that
'Diner' was “wonderfully cast and played.”People Magazinedeclared, “All the performances are
remarkable…but the ultimate triumph is Levinson’s. He captures both the surface
and the soul of an era with candor and precision.”

Mark Johnson won the Academy Award for producing the Best Picture of 1988, 'Rain
Man,' also directed by Levinson. His many other credits include 'The Natural,'
'Good Morning, Vietnam,' 'Avalon,' 'Bugsy,' 'Donnie Brasco,' 'A Perfect World,'
'The Chronicles of Narnia,' 'The Notebook,' and the award-winning TV series
'Breaking Bad,' 'Better Call Saul,' and 'Rectify.' He has chaired the foreign
language committee of the Motion Picture Academy for many years.

The Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre is located
at 8556 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90211. The phone number is (310) 478 – 3836.

Ken (Dale Midkiff) and Bob (Preston Maybank) land
in a propeller plane and speed off on motorcycles to a large mansion. Ken calls
Julie Clingstone (Debbie Laster) via radio as Bob scales the side of the
building. Julie wants him to give her access to “the mainframe” when suddenly,
somewhere a puppet (yes, a puppet)
begins yelling Danger! Danger!, obviously aware of the imminent
intrusion. Edward Brake (Wellington Meffert) is sleeping in bed in the mansion
while Bob takes off his necklace and lays it on the ledge after reaching the
mansion’s roof. He rotates a parabolic dish and the puppet, operating some sort
of a crude computer and using telepathic powers, makes the necklace turn into a
sphere (think Phantasm). Bob starts
to bleed from the face and falls to his death. The action breaks into the
opening credits to “Nightmare” as sung by Miriam Stockley.

If you’re still reading this, I commend you,
because I would have stopped at the mention of the word “puppet”. There are few
films that leave me at a loss for words (Quentin Dupieux’s 2010 film Rubber is hands-down the most
infuriating movie I have ever watched; I might have to re-watch that one as I
must have missed the point completely),
but Henri Sala’s Nightmare Weekend
(1986) is, in the words of the late film critic Gene Siskel in his review of
1978’s Surfer Girls, one of the most
improbably lousy movies I have ever seen. This doesn’t stop one’s viewing of
the film from being a total loss,
however, as Nightmare is if nothing
else that we can be absolutely sure of a time capsule of the 80’s, with
artifacts of the Zeitgeist on full display: girls workout wearing leg warmers,
a guy dances nearly everywhere with a Walkman in his pants, a tough guy and his
Laura Brannigan lookalike chick get it on atop a pinball machine, and computer equipment is
crude, big and bulky. Clocking in at 85
minutes, Nightmare seems longer than
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part
II (forgive me for mentioning them both in the same sentence, I do
apologize). Edward Brake is an entrepreneur/inventor who has created a
computerized “Biometer” which changes naturally aggressive animals into docile
house pets. He ultimately wants it to be used for the betterment of society,
but it’s just not ready for prime time. His partner Julie can’t wait for him
and goes behind his back to team up with a nefarious organization that will pay
her millions for the Biometer. Edward’s daughter Jessica Brake (Debra Hunter) is a Carol Alt
lookalike who, with her friend Annie (Lori Lewis) and another woman, has been
chosen to be part of Julie’s experiment for which they will both be paid 500
dollars each for their involvement. The idea is to see how the Biometer works
on people. The aforementioned puppet, named George, is housed in Jessica’s room
and is operated by a computer named Apache, indubitably the precursor to the Apache HTTP Server (Danger! Danger! Sarcasm!), and is part of
the whole operation. The motley crew, and there are a lot of characters to keep
track of unnecessarily, all find themselves one way or another being affected
by the Biometer.

The
two biggest issues with Nightmare are
the screenplay and the editing. I love bad movies that are entertaining but
unfortunately this isn’t one of them. The
film never seems to make up its mind as to what it wants to be: horror,
soft-core porn, comedy, campy/serious? Scenes and shots are so
short it’s nearly impossible to keep track of the goings-on. It’s also
occasionally insulting to women as they are all pretty much on display simply for
men’s gratification.

Nightmare is a Troma
production which means that it exudes its own special, patented brand of strangeness.
It’s difficult for another film director or producer to attempt to ape the Troma
style as it is a singularly unique, signature and patented style of strangeness.
Shot in July 1983 in Ocala, FL on a budget of ostensibly half a million dollars,
Nightmare defies
description which, in the hands of a seasoned auteur like David Lynch, can be a
good thing. That isn’t the case here. Nightmarefalls into the “so-bad-it’s-bad”
camp. You feel like you’re watching auditions with an amateur acting troupe,
although amazingly other reviewers have championed the acting in an otherwise
disjointed film. That being said, if you’re a fan of the film, it has been
released as a DVD/Blu-ray combo from Vinegar Syndrome. The image has been scanned in 2K and looks
really nice and is a far cry from the VHS tape from 30 years ago. It also
contains an interview with producer Marc Gottlieb that runs just under 13 minutes.
He’s very engaging and fun to listen to as he describes the making of the film
and how they promoted it at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. Dean Gates, who did
the makeup effects, speaks for nearly 23 minutes and provides us with an
interesting perspective on the effects that he created in the days before movie
companies made the switch to CGI for most of this type of work.

Vinegar Syndrome has put together a really nice
package for this title. It has a reversible cover and very colorful
artwork.

Nightmare
Weekend is best
viewed on a weekend while severely inebriated!

The
Monsterpalooza convention in Pasadena, California this coming weekend will
afford convention-goers a rare opportunity to meet the last of the great horror
film stars, the Queen of Horror herself, actress Barbara Steele.

Ms.
Steele, who is best known to genre fans for her work in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960), Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and
Mario Caiano’s Nightmare Castle
(1965), will be on hand to sign autographs and pose for photos with fans on
Friday, April 7 and Saturday, April 8, 2017.

The
convention will be held at the Pasadena Convention Center, 300 East Green
Street, Pasadena, CA 91101 from April 7 to the 9th, 2017.

The
NoHo 7 Theatre (“North Hollywood” for those not “in the know”) in Los Angeles
will be presenting a 30th anniversary screening of the uncut
director’s version of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film Robocop. The 103-minute
film, which stars Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Dan O’Herlihy, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood
Smith, and Miguel Ferrer, will be screened on Thursday, March 23, 2017 at 7:30
pm.

PLEASE NOTE: At press time, Actress Nancy
Allen is scheduled to appear in person for a discussion about the film
following the screening.

From
the press release:

RoboCop (Director's Uncut Version)

Part of our Throwback Thursday series
in partnership with Eat|See|Hear.

Stephen
King’s 1975 novel Salem’s Lot began
life as an unpublished short story (“Jerusalem’s Lot”) while Mr. King was still
in college. When he decided to expand it
into a novel he posed the question as to what would happen if Count Dracula
were to come back in 20th Century America, and his wife Tabitha
joked that he would probably get run over by a cab in New York City. It was originally titled Second Coming, however it was changed at the urging of Mrs. King because
it sounded like a “bad sex story” (she’s was right, and had a dirty mind to
boot!). The 439-page book was then made
into an effective TV-movie four years later, premiering in two parts on both
November 17 and November 24 on CBS. TV-movies
are a completely different animal than theatrical films as they are often shot
in a much quicker fashion. Salem’s Lot is no exception. The multiple-hour-long film was shot during a
seven-week stretch in July and August of 1979.

The
film’s construction is elliptical in nature and begins at the end with David
Soul as Ben Mears and Lance Kerwin as Mark Petrie, both obviously dirty, worn
out, and tired, as they collect holy water from a church in Mexico. They have been on the run for a while, but we
don’t know why. The action then switches
back to two years previous when Mears returns to the town of Salem’s Lot in
Maine (in reality the Victorian Village of Ferndale, CA). The small town feel is obvious from the get-go
as townspeople know and greet one another with polite familiarity. Novelist Mears drives into town and eyes the
Marsten House (a false front constructed for the film that was burned down at
the end; Peter Medak did the same thing in his masterful 1980 film The Changeling) and as it turns out he
had quite a scare there when he was a child. His attraction to the huge manse, which is reputed to be haunted, only
intensifies when he learns that two antique dealers, Richard Straker (James
Mason) and Kurt Barlow (Reggie Nalder), have purchased it and are opening up a
new shop in the Salem’s Lot business district. Barlow is reputed to be traveling throughout Europe acquiring new and
fancy merchandise to sell at the new store, however despite Mr. Straker’s
constant insistence that he will arrive shortly, his absence is felt. Mears, meanwhile, moves into a boarding house
temporarily to work on his new novel and finds himself romancing Susan Norton
(Bonnie Bedelia of Die Hard), a local
fan of his. Things in Salem’s Lot seem
to take a turn for the worse when Straker asks a moving company to lower a
crate into his basement; cold air emanates from the wooden enclosure and the
movers run off in fright. Several deaths
occur within the town, most horrifically among them children. When the vampire finally appears in the form
of Reggie Nalder, he is quite a sight to behold. Mark Petrie (Lance Kerwin), a teenage horror
film fan who also is an aficionado of magic, gets caught up in the mayhem and
when his parents are killed he vows revenge against Barlow. Together with Ben, Mark finds himself on the
run from vampires…

The
film’s signature image of a vampire in the form of one of the young boys with
bloodshot eyes floating outside of a window is still creepy by today’s
standards. Many young children suffered
through sleepless nights 37 years ago when the film aired, mostly due to this
sequence. The film also boasts a spooky
score by Harry Sukman which punctuates the action in a fashion that keeps in
line with similar made-for-TV movies of the period and is every bit as good as
anything concocted by composers Robert Cobert and Dominic Frontiere.

As
you watch the film you’re struck by just how many of the wonderful character
actors who appear are no longer with us: uncredited Reggie Nalder as Barlow;
Elisha Cook, Jr. and Marie Windsor, who both appeared as a couple in Stanley
Kubrick’s The Killing in 1955; James
Mason as Straker, and Kenneth MacMillian as the constable.

Salem’s Lot, in addition to many syndicated
airings, was released on VHS in the 1980’s by Warner Home Video in the form of
the 112-minute European theatrical cut, which removes 71 minutes (roughly 38%)
of the original television broadcast. While I am grateful that the 183-minute version is the one released on
this new Warner Blu-ray, it would have been nice to have had the 112-minute cut
on here as well just to be able to compare the two. Perhaps the master for that cut has been
misplaced? Director Tobe Hooper, still
riding the wave of the success of The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973) but having faltered with Eaten Alive (1976) and then getting fired
from the set of The Dark (1979),
regains his horror footing here before going on to make the little gem The Funhouse (1981) and the spectacular Poltergeist (1982). The sole extra on this otherwise bare-bones
release is a running commentary by Mr. Hooper, but this is sufficient and
should satisfy even the most die-hard fans of the film.

William
Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A.,
which opened on Friday, November 1, 1985 to lukewarm notices and underwhelming
box office despite being championed by Roger Ebert’s four-star review, is a
highly stylized, dark, and uncompromising crime thriller that boasts a
then-unknown cast with a story and a pace that feels more suited to the
1970’s. It also contains what I consider
to be the greatest car chase ever filmed and edited for a major motion picture,
which took no less than five weeks to plan and shoot. Having seen Mr. Friedkin’s brilliant East
Coast police thriller The French
Connection (1971) on VHS in 1986, I made it a point the following year to
catch up with his West Coast-based story of a Secret Service agent, Richard
Chance (William Petersen), whose best friend and partner Jim Hart (Michael
Greene) has been murdered by artist/currency counterfeiter Rick Masters (Willem
Dafoe). Chance has one goal: put Masters away for life with no regard for how
he has to do it. Truthfully, he would
prefer to kill him. This causes problems
for his new partner John Vukovich (John Pankow) who comes from a family of law
enforcement officers and wants to do things by the book. Vukovich’s patience and unwillingness to go
outside the boundaries of acceptability is tested when: Chance surreptitiously removes
crucial evidence from a crime scene in order to get to Masters; springs a
prisoner friend (John Turturro) of Masters without Vukovich’s knowledge to get
him to testify; and most notably forces Vukovich to go along with a plan to
obtain cash needed to get closer to Masters while nearly dying in what is
arguably the cinema’s most exciting getaway car chase sequence. What makes the chase work so well is that
it’s physical, it’s possible (though highly improbable), and it’s not done in a
Fast and the Furious, over-the-top
sort of way. It also comes as a result
of a plot point and isn’t just there for the sake of having a chase scene. Chance also beds a willing parolee (Darlanne
Fluegel) who gives him information on current convicts in order to provide for
herself and her son Christopher.

Despite
the intricate plot and the phenomenal car chase, I initially didn’t like the
film. The mixture of Eighties-style pop
music by Wang Chung (which turned me off, but I now feel fits the movie like a
glove) and disreputable characters were off-putting, but subsequent viewings gave
me a change of heart and I now feel that this is the last truly great film
directed by Mr. Friedkin. Like the
inexorable Popeye Doyle in The French
Connection (he will stop at nothing to put drug dealers and users away),
Chance will stop at nothing to stop and punish Masters. The difference between the two films is that
the former paints Brooklyn and New York City as gritty and almost despairing
cities whereas the latter bathes the frame in a Los Angeles that we have not
seen before. While also gritty, grimy
and dark, this is a Los Angeles that is also highly glossy and beautiful, with
beautiful people who are about as real as the counterfeit bills that Masters
manufactures. This is the overall theme of
To Live and Die in L.A. which is to
say that it’s about fraudulence. People
use each other for their own personal gains. Masters is an artist but hates what he paints and burns his work in
frustration. Since he cannot find joy or
satisfaction in his own originality, he resorts to copying others, in this case
$20, $50, and $100 bills in a procedure that is painstaking and difficult.

Like
The French Connection, To Live and Die in LA is also based on a
novel of the same name, this one written by former Secret Service Agent Gerald
Petievich. What makes the film almost
remarkable is the opening sequence which features a martyr who shouts “Allahu
Akbar” while blowing himself up on the roof a hotel where President Reagan is
giving a speech. This scene made little
sense to me 29 years ago, but is eerily prescient of the world that we
unfortunately live in today.

The
performances are excellent all around. William Petersen, whose film debut was as a bar bouncer in Michael
Mann’s Thief (1981), is terrific as
Rick Chance and plays him as a daredevil whose cowboy nature makes him a
dangerous person to be around. This is
established in an early sequence wherein Chance bungee jumps off of the Vincent
Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, CA. In
addition to the martyr sequence, this could also be one of the earliest
instances of this now highly popular activity showing up in a major motion
picture. John Pankow is also quite good
as Chance’s conflicted partner. The
stand-out is Willem Dafoe as Masters, whose icy expressions and demeanor can
change on a moment’s notice without warning. Darlanne Fluegel is mysterious as Chance’s muse; I first saw her in Battle Beyond the Stars (1980). Debra Feuer is striking as Masters’
girlfriend and confidante. Dean Stockwell
is great as Masters’ lawyer. You can
almost see him prepping himself for the role of Ben in David Lynch’s masterful Blue Velvet the following year. Steve James is an actor I always liked ever
since I first saw him in the “Night Vigil” episode of T.J. Hooker in 1984. He
started in the industry as a stunt man in films such as The Wiz, The Wanderers, The Warriors, Dressed to Kill, and He Knows
You’re Alone prior to onscreen acting. Here he plays Jeff, one of Masters’ clients and his performance, though
small, shines. He also appeared in the
William Friedkin TV-movie C.A.T. Squad
in 1986, which was also written by Mr. Petievich. His premature death in 1993 from what is
rumored to be the medical treatment that he received after a cancer diagnosis is
a tremendous loss to the entertainment industry.

It’s
a scary thought, indeed, to think that it has been twenty-nine years since I
first saw Dario Argento’s fifth giallo
feature film which I had read about two years earlier in the pages of a back
issue of Fangoria Magazine.The word giallo is the Italian word for the color
yellow, and has found new life in describing a subgenre of the Italian horror
film that refers to a who-done-it involving a killer who conceals their identity
by wearing a large coat, a wide-brimmed hat, unisex footwear and gloves, their
face always obscured or hidden completely.Very often we see the killer only in synecdoche.These stories all originated in the form of
pulp novellas which sported yellow covers, hence the use of the term giallo.

Whereas
the word giallo is always spelled one
way, the correct spelling of the film’s title, Tenebrae, has always been up for debate. One is never sure if it is Tenebre or Tenebrae. In reality, Tenebrae is the Latin word for shadows and darkness and also
refers to a Christian religious service which I personally have never been
privy to. Nevertheless, in regards to
the spelling of the title of Mr. Argento’s film, either one is much better than
the horrendous and Americanized Unsane,
which even trimmed the film’s running time down to 91 minutes. Considering that Unsane played on 42nd Street in New York City, a place
where horror films, sci-fi outings, and future cult movies were dumped and
rarely ever given advertising space in newspapers, the audiences were probably
comprised of folks either too wasted or asleep to care what they were watching,
so cutting out extraneous blood and gore seems silly in retrospect.

Peter
Neal (Anthony Franciosa) is a popular novelist whose new book, Tenebrae, has just been released. He flies from New York to Rome for a press
junket arranged by his agent Bullmer (John Saxon in a strangely comedic turn)
and his publicist Anne (Daria Nicolodi whose voice is dubbed by, of all people,
Theresa Russell!). He plays nice with journalist/feminist
friend Tilde (Mirella D’Angelo), who labels Neal’s work as misogynistic, and finds
himself interrogated by an overly adoring talk show host/fan (John Steiner),
and ends up being stalked by a crazed killer who adores his work. In the thick of it, he has an affair with
Anne, nearly has a tryst with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and does
his best to help the police detectives who are working his case. Throughout all of this mayhem, Mr. Argento’s
camera is heavily engaged in the action, whether it represents the killer
trying to find a hiding place through a subjective POV shot, or just decides to
do an incredible sweep from one side of Tilde’s apartment, over the roof, and
on to the other side. This virtuoso
camerawork was accomplished by using the Louma Crane and was operated by the
late cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, who also shot Suspiria for Mr. Argento.

Tenebrae’splot is interesting
enough to keep the audience guessing until the final frame. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with
horror films and Mr. Argento’s work in particular will be able to figure out
the killer’s identity. This truth should
not prevent one from their enjoyment of viewing the film, however. Watching Tenebrae
again nearly made me want to cry because it reminded me of why Mr. Argento is
my favorite horror film director. Between 1974 and 1987 he directed six consecutive films that were not
only wildly entertaining but also incredibly imaginative and visually arresting. They are vast improvements over the narrative
dullness (albeit cinematically striking) of Four
Flies on Grey Velvet and The Cat
O’Nine Tails, although his debut film, The
Bird with the Crystal Plumage, was terrific. Deep
Red, Suspiria, Inferno, Tenebrae, Phenomena and Opera are six of the most stylish and
compulsively watchable movies that I have ever seen. Mr. Argento’s output following Opera has been uneven at best, with Sleepless and Do You Like Hitchcock? being the few standouts.

Tenebraeis one of Mr.
Argento’s best written, acted, and most tightly constructed films. It’s also one of his most violent and bloody
works. Like the tongue lashing that Peter
Neal receives at the hands of ill-fated Tilde, Mr. Argento received harsh
criticism upon the film’s release regarding not only the subject matter, but
the manner in which the female characters are horrifically dispatched. When you compare Tenebrae to some of the contemporary horror films, the sort of
torture porn that has become prevalent in the genre of late, Tenebrae seems fairly time in
comparison. For some people, it’s a
toss-up between this and Deep Red, as
to which is his best film. Tenebrae had its genesis when Mr.
Argento and his partner Daria Nicolodi were promoting Suspiria in Los Angeles in 1977 wherein a fan was stalking the
director, and left him a note telling him that he wanted to kill him. Check, please!

Tenebrae has some great extras and they are
comprised of:

An
all-new Synapse Films supervised color correction and restoration of a 1080p
scan from original uncut negative elements, presented in the original aspect
ratio of 1.85:1. The film looks
terrific. I was lucky enough to see a
screening of the film in a beautiful 35mm print imported from Norway through
Exhumed Films in February 2008, and this Blu-ray looks better than that.

Dual
English and Italian language options with newly-translated English subtitle
tracks for both.

Audio
commentary track featuring film critic and Argento scholar, Maitland McDonagh. This is a terrific commentary as Mrs.
McDonagh proves herself to be highly authoritative on the subject of this
film. Considering that she wrote the
first book I ever recall seeing on Dario Argento in 1991, this should come as
no surprise. Unfortunately, the
commentary that originally appeared on the Anchor Bay DVD with Dario Argento,
Claudio Simonetti and Lori Cursi has not been ported over, so hang on to that
DVD because that is a worthy commentary as well.

Ninety-minute,
in-depth documentary Yellow Fever: The
Rise and Fall of the Giallo by High Rising Productions, chronicling the
giallo film genre from its beginnings as early 20th century crime fiction, to
its later influences on the modern slasher film genre. [SPECIAL FEATURE EXCLUSIVE TO THE BLU-RAY
DISC]. This is a terrific documentary
which features interviews with Dario Argento, Maitland McDonagh, Mikel Koven,
Ruggero Deodato, Kim Newman, Umberto Lenzi, Dardano Sachetti, Richard Stanley,
Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Alan Jones, and Luigi Cozzi to name a few. The giallo
genre is attributed to the writings of Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, P.D.
James, and Arthur Conan Doyle and is a great addition to this edition.

Original
UNSANE (U.S. version of TENEBRAE) end credits sequence [SPECIAL FEATURE
EXCLUSIVE TO THE BLU-RAY DISC]

Directors
Joe Dante (1984’s Gremlins) and Allan Arkush (1979’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School) cut their teeth in Hollywood putting
together trailers for Roger Corman films in the early 1970s and got the idea to
make their own film by piecing together stock footage from other Corman pics
and shooting a story around the clips. Armed with $55,000 from Mr. Corman, Hollywood
Boulevard is the result. Released in
1976 on a smattering of screens, Hollywood
Boulevard is a charming and entertaining send-up of Hollywood filmmaking
which stars the incomparable (and sadly, the late) Candice Rialson as Candy Wednesday, a fresh-off-the-bus
naïve blonde who, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, wants to be an actress
and walks straight into the office of agent Walter Paisley (Dick Miller). His advice to just go out and walk the
streets and be seen is taken quite literally, and she finds herself suckered
into the middle of a bank robbery while assuming that it’s a movie being shot
(that old gag!). It takes Candy some
time to see through the bank robber’s real intent, but amazingly it does not
seem to faze or dissuade her from getting into showbiz. Eventually she manages to hook up with a
ragtag group of performers who work for Miracle Pictures – their motto is “If
it’s a good movie, it’s a miracle!” They
are making a film called Machete Maidens
of Mora Tau II, which is directed by a campy and pretentious director named
Erich Von Leppe (Paul Bartel) who orders around his leading lady (Mary Woronov).
Unfortunately for her, she is replacing
an actress who died on the set while Machete
Maidens was being shot! Could the
same fate befall her? Candy, now doing
stunts for Miracle Pictures, catches the attention of Patrick (Jeffrey Kramer
of Jaws), a writer, and they begin a
passionate affair while making films. A
series of misadventures follows when the crew goes to the Philippines to shoot.
There is a hilarious bit where Candy, Walter, and Patrick view their finished
product at the old Gilmore Drive-In in Los Angeles. Candy eventually becomes a
glamourous film star and Patrick a successful screenwriter.

Hollywood Boulevard was shot in August 1975 in Los Angeles
over a period of ten days(!) and is a film clearly love sonnet to the industry. There are street shots of Grauman’s Chinese
Theater (Ovidio G. Assonitis and Robert Barrett’s Beyond the Door is on the marquee!), while another theatre boasts Jaws and Dog Day Afternoon. Can you
imagine that there was a time in this country when you could go a theatre and these two films would be playing at the
same time? Try finding any theatre
nowadays boasting films half the
caliber of these two titles. The Pussycat
Theater offers Fred Donaldson’s Sometime
Sweet Susan to those adventurous enough to head through the doors (Martin
Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was being
filmed during the same time in New York City and Susan is on a marquee in that film, too). The film is loaded with silly action that the
low budget would allow and ADR-looped lines abound.

Scorpion
Releasing has done a wonderful job of transferring Hollywood Boulevard. With
the exception of two brief streaks down the left side of the frame early on the
transfer, the 2K scan of the film’s inter-positive is a revelation, easily the
best the film has ever looked. There are
some nice extras on this edition, which is limited to 1,500 copies: the
feature-length commentary with directors Joe Dante and Allan Arkush and producer
Jon Davison has been ported over from the 2001 DVD release. Even if you are not a fan of the film (how
can you not be?!), the commentary is worth the price of the Blu-ray alone as it
has a terrific insight into the manner in which low budget filmmaking at New
World Pictures was done in the 1970s. Director Dante is very engaging and hilarious to listen to, recalling
with amazing swiftness which films the scenes were culled from, and funny
anecdotes about the scenes and how and when they were shot.

There
are also a handful of brand new on-screen interviews with:

Joe Dante (15:26) He quite correctly
points out that despite the fact that more movies are available for viewing now
than ever before, younger audiences don’t know about these films (foreign and
the like) because they haven’t been exposed to them.

Allan Arkush and Jon Davison (15:23) are
very funny to listen to, discussing how they came to direct and produce
respectively Hollywood Boulevard and
how they met Jeffrey Kramer and came to cast him.

Mary Woronov (11:18) speaks zealously
about her time working for New World Pictures.

Roger Corman (7:00) reiterates how
little money it took to make the film and how much he genuinely loves it.

Jeffrey
Kramer (13:16) gets a decent amount of screen time here, reminiscing about his
early days in the film industry, and tells a very funning anecdote about the
premiere of his TV series Struck by
Lightning in which he co-starred with Jack Elam. I liked this show which debuted on Wednesday,
September 19, 1979, but I was also ten years-old, and after a total of three
episodes it was cancelled due to low ratings.

Miller
Drake (3:30) was the assistant cameraman and talks about the perils of shooting
up near the Hollywood sign.

The
Blu-ray also contains the original theatrical trailer and an edition of Dante’s popular Trailers From Hell.

I
would have loved to have seen a tribute to the late actress Candice Rialson,
who passed away in 2006 at the age of 54 from liver disease. She appeared in
Raphael Nussbaum’s controversial exploitation/social commentary film Pets in 1973, the 1974 movie-of-the-week
The Girl on the Late, Late Show and a
series of three exploitation films, Candy
Stripe Nurses, Mama’s Dirty Girls,
and Summer School Teachers, all in
1974. She was a real trouper and is
spoken of highly by Jeffrey Kramer as a kind and funny person. She is deserving of her own documentary.

Machete Maidens of Mora Tau II is a film that I really want to see,
and it would have been wonderful if it was actually made (a la Machete (2010) being born from Grindhouse (2007).

Watching
Hollywood Boulevard again suddenly
made me think of David Lynch’s Mulholland
Drive (2001), with Naomi Watts’s wide-eyed Betty leaving the parking lot of
LAX to “make it in the movies”. Candice
Rialson was a wonderful film personality and truly deserved to go on and enjoy
success in the Dream Factory.

(Note: this title appears to have sold out quickly though some dealers on eBay are offering it.)

Freddie Francis had a long and prosperous career in the cinema, learning many areas of filmmaking by cutting his teeth as a stills photographer, clapper boy, camera loader and focus puller; he also worked on training films while in the army.Garnering enough experience led him to become a camera operator on films as diverse as The Tales of Hoffman (a favorite of George Romero’s and Martin Scorsese’s), Twice Upon a Time, and Beat the Devil.He also worked as a cinematographer on The Innocents, Night Must Fall, The Elephant Man, and Dune, while scoring two Oscars for shooting Sons and Lovers and Glory.In the midst of this, he managed to find time to direct more than his share of thrillers in the 1960’s and 1970’s, chief among them The Brain, Paranoiac, Nightmare, The Evil of Frankenstein, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, The Skull, Trog, Tales from the Crypt, and The Creeping Flesh.Most genre fans grew up seeing these films on late-night television or on weekend broadcasts, and they all have appeared on home video in a variety of different formats.

One of Mr. Francis’ most elusive titles is the bizarre, black comedy Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly, released Stateside simply as Girly in 1970.Now available on an all-region NTSC DVD by the fine Scorpion Releasing, which has also brought us Sweet William, Cheerleaders Wild Weekend, Say Hello to Yesterday, and The Last Grenade to name a few, Girly, Based upon Maisie Mosco’s stage play Happy Family, is an obscure and fairly macabre tale of a brother and sister (Howard Trevor and Vanessa Howard) who suffer from a form of arrested development at the hands of their crazed mother (Ursula Howells) and equally batty nanny (Pat Heywood) who treat the twenty-somethings as if they were still toddlers.Mumsy and Nanny refer to Sonny and Girly (who both wear school uniforms that they clearly are too old to be wearing) as their "darling loves" and smother them with creepy affection.They play in schoolyards and zoos, looking for “new friends” and rope them into their staged games by kidnapping them and taking them back to their enormous house (in reality the Oakley Court Hotel in Windsor, England) to incorporate them into their day for fun.Among these “new friends” are men they refer to as “soldier” and “number five” who are both held prisoner.An unfortunate couple (Michael Bryant and Imogen Hassall) is fooled by their childish charms and the woman meets her untimely demise through an “accident” that Girly blames on the man. The poor guy ends up at their house with his girlfriend’s body dumped in a chest.In order to stay alive, he’s forced to be polite and made to ask, “Please may I have some bread, Mumsy?” and “Please, may I be excused?” prior to using the water closet which is outfitted with an artificial toilet that houses a jack-in-the-box.Any attempt to flee the premises is met with stern warnings of being “sent to the angels” should such further actions occur. Michael Haneke more than likely took a cue from this film when he made both versions of his film Funny Games which were far more gruesome and tragic.

I
first became acquainted with director Peter Medak’s work in 1983 when I saw his
1980 masterwork The Changeling, one
of the most frightening ghost stories shot in color. Also known for 1972’s The Ruling Class and 1990’s The
Krays, Mr. Medak made the film noir Romeo
is Bleeding, shot in 1992 and released on Friday, February 4, 1994. The film is told in an elliptical narrative
fashion, starting with the end and going back in time to show us how the
protagonist got to where he is. We first
see Jack Grimaldi in a dilapidated diner, his voiceover indicative of a man
full of regrets who is probably in the Witness Protection Program and forced to
lead a life bereft of any true purpose or feeling. Once upon a time, he was a police officer in
New York City and his partners are comprised of actors we know well today: Scully
(David Proval from Mean Streets and The Sopranos), Martie (Will Patton from 24), John (Gene Canfield from Law & Order), and Joey (Larry Joshua
from NYPD Blue). Unfortunately, his lust for money gets the
better of him and he sells out the criminal witnesses to the Mafia. His wife Natalie (Annabella Sciorra) knows
that he’s up to something and is on to his affairs as well (he dilly dallies
with Sheri, a nineteen year-old mistress played by Juliette Lewis who dances
for him among other things), and catches a glimpse of the secret hiding place
that he foolishly stashes his cash in the corner of the backyard.

Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin) is a Russian
assassin who is out to take down the Mafia that Jack works for. The head of that organization is Don Falcone
(Roy Scheider) who pays Jack to kill her and wants the job done yesterday. Unfortunately for Falcone, Mona is drop dead
gorgeous and Jack weakens in her presence while he is guarding her a dumpy
hotel that the police use to hold suspects. Mona exerts a tremendous amount of sexual power and although Jack seems
to buckle under her spell, the two of them also realize that their couplings
are only business. Jack may love
Natalie, but she apparently cannot give him what he gets from Sheri and Mona,
which is to be dominated. Jack uses both
sex and money as a drug, he cannot seem to get enough of either one of
them.

It’s interesting to note that the film
is written by a woman, Hilary Henkin, who also wrote Fatal Beauty (1987), Road
House (1989), and Wag the Dog
(1997). There is an obvious female slant
to the story as the men are reduced to squirming little gerbils while the women
wield all the power. Even Natalie
momentarily and jokingly turns the tables on Jack while pointing a gun at him. We are not sure if she is kidding knowing
what we, the audience, knows and Jack isn’t sure either. It’s a moment that seems to last a very long
time. After all the craziness that
occurs between this moment and the end of the film, we are right bar at the bar
with Jack as he waits for Natalie to show, and we cannot help but wonder if she
ever will.

Much of the covert action takes place
at night where the probability of being discovered is high. There are moments of questionable judgment,
such as Mona forcing Jack to dig a grave for Falcone in full view of the
Brooklyn Bridge and nearby building complexes, and Jack digging through his
money while any of his neighbors could easily see him. The late Mr. Scheider, who appeared in
a slew of terrific films in the 1970’s (Klute,
The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, Jaws, Marathon Man, Sorcerer, Jaws 2, All
That Jazz), is one of my favorite actors but he is unusually stiff in the
role of mobster Falcone. He also didn’t
look well, as his death from Multiple Myeloma in 2008 confirmed that he was
probably sick for some time. The late Dennis
Farina, on the other hand, after having played Jimmy Serrano in Martin Brest’s brilliant
1988 comedy Midnight Run, does a
funny turn as a mobster turncoat in the single scene that he appears in.

I liked Romeo is Bleeding far more than I did in 1994. I was very naïve about mob life at the time
and how the police handle such matters, so after my graduation from The Sopranos the plot is far more obvious
than it was twenty-two years ago. The
new limited edition (3,000 units) Blu-ray from Twilight Time boasts a really nice transfer. However, if you are looking for a special feature-laden
set, this is not it. Aside from a
booklet with a nice essay from Julie Kirgo and an isolated score, this is a
very slim package. I love running
commentaries and would have enjoyed one from director Medak who provided an
informative feature-length commentary on the Dutch DVD release of The Changeling.

I
was first introduced to comic books in 1979 by my father’s cousin, Dan, who had
an unusually large collection of them in his parent’s basement. I had already seen Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie (1978) twice and
loved it, completely enthralled with the big screen adventures of the Man of
Steel as embodied by Christopher Reeve. I
knew of Superman’s origins with DC Comics. Dan’s mother remarked, while he was in the basement of course, that she
wished that he would “get rid of the comic books”. It’s a good thing he didn’t. Today, along with Jim Lee, Dan DiDio is the
current Co-Publisher of DC Comics. In
the years hence, I have followed my fair share of comic book characters, but
never with the level of enthusiasm that is on display at the annual San Diego
Comic Con or the New York Comic Con (for the uninitiated, here “con” is
industry shorthand for “convention”, a gathering of fans who exalt with others
over their favorite comic book characters and movies). The level of enthusiasm on display at these
gatherings on opposite coasts, as well as the financial support they give to
their favorite superheroes, are what keep the artists and writers
employed.

Comix: Beyond the Comic Book Pages is the new 85-minute documentary that
takes viewers behind the scenes not only at the cons, but also into the world
of making comic books, and what it takes to prevail in a saturated market. It’s also a film about gratitude and
appreciation. Many people give thanks to
their relatives for buying them comic books; others thank the artists for their
favorite characters; still others thank both the artists and publishers for
their advice. Directed by Michael
Valentine, the film is fittingly a valentine to the creators and the fans. Heavyweights in the comic book arena who
appear are Stan Lee, the creator of Spiderman
(he has an amusing story about that); Mike Richardson, the founder of Dark
Horse Comics; Neal Adams; Frank Miller of Sin
City and 300; Todd MacFarlane; John
Romita, Jr.; and Renae Geerlings.

When
I watch a documentary, I am eager to learn something new. The history of comic books is fascinating as
they were deemed unfit for children, and there was a movement afoot to keep
them out of the hands of the little ones. The making of a comic book is also discussed in-depth in a way that I
had not heard before. There is a distinction
made between the artist who draws with pencils and the inker who applies the
colors. Very often the writers (who
provide character development and dialog) and the artists never speak to one
another!

Comix is accentuated by a spirited score by composer Michael
Crane. The fans depicted in the film are
all shapes and sizes and come from the far corners of the globe. A veritable melting pot of people
encompassing all races and creeds who converge on these convention centers
armed with backpacks, cameras, posters, photos, action figures, and just about
anything else that you can think of to have autographed and the opportunity to
meet their favorite artists, actors/actresses, and writers up close. What amazes me is the phenomenon of Cosplay
(a contraction of “costume play”) wherein fans dress up to look exactly like
the comic book characters they love. As
a frequent convention goer for twenty-nine years, I have noticed a demonstrable
surge in attendance of fans who partake in this role-playing lifestyle. The segments involving Cosplay made me
realize something that I had not thought of before. These people don’t just dress up. They want to become their favorite characters for the duration of the
convention. Their costumes are
magnificent, often indistinguishable from the big-screen counterparts. As a child, Halloween gave me the opportunity
to wear some truly awful and cheap-looking “costumes”. I was a Star
Wars Stormtrooper and wore this costume with a picture on my chest of the
Stormtrooper holding a gun! The
Stormtroopers that fans dress us as at the conventions look like they stepped
out of the actual movie. No comparison
whatsoever.

The
film is now available from Kino Lorber in a nicely illustrated 2-disc DVD set
that comes with a mini comic book and a whole host of extras. On disc one is the documentary, as well as
the following extra outtakes that equal roughly 70 additional minutes:

The
NoHo 7, the Playhouse 7, and the Royal in Los Angeles will all be showing a
double feature of two of Doris Day’s best-known films on Monday, August 29,
2016. At 7:00 pm The Man Who Knew Too Much, the classic 1956 film directed by Alfred
Hitchcock, will be screened as part of its 60th anniversary. At 4:30 pm and again at 9:30 pm, 1961’s Lover Come Back, directed by Delbert
Mann, will be screened as part of its 55th anniversary.

From
the press release:

Doris Day Double
Feature

Part
of our Anniversary Classics series. For details, visit: laemmle.com/ac.

Click here to buy tickets to the 4:30PM Lover
Come Back (includes admission to the 7PM The Man Who Knew Too Much).

Click here to buy tickets to the 7PM The Man Who
Knew Too Much (includes admission to the 9:30PM Lover Come Back).

Laemmle’s Anniversary Classics presents
a tribute to Doris Day, one of the last surviving stars of Hollywood’s Golden
Age. Day was the number one female box office star of the 20th century, but she
was sometimes underrated as an actress. She excelled in musicals, comedy, and
drama and during the 1950s and 60s she was one of the few actresses who
regularly played working women. We offer a double feature of two of her most
popular films, the 60th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and
the 55th anniversary of Lover Come
Back (1961). So you won’t miss any of the fun, the Doris Day double bill
plays at three locations: the Royal in West L.A., Laemmle NoHo 7, and the
Playhouse 7 in Pasadena on Monday, August 29.

We will have trivia contests with
prizes at all three locations.

In ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much,’ one of
Doris Day’s rare forays into the thriller genre, the actress introduced one of
her most successful songs, the Oscar-winning hit, “Que Sera Sera.” But she also
demonstrated her versatility in several harrowing and suspenseful dramatic
scenes. She plays the wife of one of Hitchcock’s favorite actors, James
Stewart. The movie was a box office bonanza for all parties. Hitchcock’s
success during the 1940s allowed the director to employ bigger budgets and
shoot on location for several of his Technicolor thrillers in the 1950s,
including To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. For The Man Who
Knew Too Much, a remake of his own 1934 film, Hitchcock traveled to Morocco and
to London for some spectacular location scenes. In his famous series of
interviews with the Master of Suspense, Francois Truffaut wrote, “In the
construction as well as in the rigorous attention to detail, the remake is by
far superior to the original.” The plot turns on kidnapping and assassination,
all building to a concert scene in the Royal Albert Hall that climaxes
memorably with the clash of a pair of cymbals.

‘Lover Come Back’ was the second comedy
teaming of Doris Day with Rock Hudson, on the heels of their huge 1959 hit, Pillow
Talk. Day and Hudson play rival advertising executives who vie for an account
that doesn’t exist, dreamed up by Hudson to throw Day off the track, further
complicated by their romantic entanglement. Screenwriters Stanley Shapiro (who
won an Oscar for ‘Pillow Talk’) and Paul Henning concocted a witty scenario
with deft sight gags, targeting the influence of Madison Avenue in the era, and
their original screenplay was Oscar-nominated in 1961. Day, Hudson, and a
winning supporting cast including Tony Randall, Edie Adams and Jack Kruschen
are all at the top of their game, nimbly directed by Delbert Mann. The New York
Times’ Bosley Crowther raved about “…this springy and sprightly surprise, which
is one of the brightest, most satiric comedies since ‘It Happened One Night.’
The Times also celebrated the box office smash as “the funniest picture of the
year.”

Zev
Guttman (Christopher Plummer) is an elderly Jewish New York nursing home
resident whose wife, Ruth, recently passed on. In the early stages of dementia, he finds himself forgetting things,
such as Ruth’s death, which is evident each time that he awakens and calls out
her name. Zev is also a survivor of the
Auschwitz concentration camp (presumably Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which was a
combination concentration camp and extermination camp). Another nursing home resident, Max Rosenbaum
(Martin Landau), recognizes Zev from the camp. While Zev is able-bodied and mentally declining, Max is confined to a
wheelchair yet as smart as a whip and in full control of his faculties. Max reminds Zev that their families were
murdered during World War II at the hands of a ruthless Blockführer named Otto
Wallisch who fled Germany under the name of “Rudy Kurlander”. Max has managed to locate four people living
in the United States under this assumed name and has a hunch that once of them
is the one and only Otto Wallisch. He
has spared no expense to send Zev out on a mission, armed with thousands of
dollars in cash, a handgun, and written instructions to find and murder Wallisch
in retaliation for his actions. Zev
sneaks out of the nursing home and escapes detection, much to the dismay of his
son and daughter-in-law who frantically search for him. When Zev makes his way across the country
looking for the various Rudy Kurlander’s, he comes face to face with people who
fled German occupied countries and sympathizes with them. Bruno Ganz plays the first such fleer and his
role is a small one, however it is revealed on the commentary that he had a
much longer monologue and I wish that it had been reinstated for the home video
release. This actor also played Adolph
Hitler in Downfall (2004).

The
second Rudy Kurlander is a bedridden homosexual whose plight moves Zev to
tears. Later, a case of mistaken
identity lands Zev unwittingly in the home of an anti-Semite played with
horrific gusto by Dean Norris, an actor who just gets better with every role he
plays. By the time he makes it to the
home of the fourth man he is looking for, the ending is not what we expect, and
it’s easy to carp about whether or not it’s effective or predictable.

I
have never seen a boring film by Atom Egoyan. One of the most interesting directors working today, Mr. Egoyan’s films
are fascinating cinematic revelations which I look forward to each time he
announces a new project. Canadian
audiences are probably most familiar with his earlier work which consist of Family Viewing (1987) and Speaking Parts (1989). His best works, The Adjuster (1991), Exotica
(1994), and The Sweet Hereafter
(1997), brought him worldwide attention and rightfully so as they are easily
three of the greatest films to come out of the Canadian film industry. Remember
does not quite reach the heights of these three films (it is less cinematically
interesting than its predecessors), but it is still an interesting outing given
his output since 2005’s Where the Truth
Lies which, 2008’s Adoration
notwithstanding, has been fairly uneven. Most of Remember’s detractors
fault the screenplay and the aforementioned denouement, in addition to the
questionable choice of using the Holocaust as a subject for a revenge drama
with characters seemingly fashioned after modern-day stereotypes. All that aside, watching Christopher
Plummer’s portrayal of Zev kept me captivated. It’s a carefully understated interpretation of a role that was written
with him in mind. I first saw him
onscreen as Sir Charles Litton in Blake Edwards’s The Return of the Pink Panther in the summer of 1975 when I was
almost seven years-old and found him to be funny and charming. His turn as Zev is, obviously, much
different, as we follow him through his routines of getting dressed, falling
asleep and waking up in a confused state. Mr. Plummer plays the role with maximum efficiency and basically
inhabits Zev’s skin. His forgetfulness and
need to refer to written notes calls to mind Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000).

The
Blu-ray from Lionsgate comes with some nice extras. There is a full-length audio commentary with director Egoyan, producer
Robert Lantos and screenwriter Benjamin August who discuss how the project came
about and the casting of those involved. I have always loved commentaries as they give you a terrific insight
into how the creators intended certain scenes to play and how they actually are
presented. Mr. Egoyan has always been
especially articulate when discussing his films and this commentary is no
exception.

There
is also a featurette entitled Performances
to Remember which runs roughly 17 minutes and is essentially a
behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film and on-set interviews
conducted with some of the performers regarding their roles. More than a few minutes are spent on the set
of the anti-Semite’s house and the director explains how it was deliberately
built to accommodate Paul Sarossy’s camera (Mr. Egoyan’s longtime
cinematographer) from a multitude of angles. Mr. Plummer also weighs in on his role of Zev.

A Tapestry of Evil: Remembering the
Past is a featurette that runs about 14
minutes and it focuses on screenwriter Benjamin August’s desire to write a film
about the hunt for Nazi war criminals.

The new Metrograph Theater on Ludlow
Street in New York just finished a series called “This is PG?!” which screened
35mm prints of films that traumatized youngsters during their initial releases
after having been granted a PG-rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. Films that were released prior to the July
1984 introduction of the PG-13 rating such as Jaws (1975), Burnt Offerings
(1976), Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978), Tourist Trap (1979), Poltergeist (1982) and, most
specifically, Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom (1984) all had a hand in helping to create the new rating to
bridge the gap between PG-rated films that weren’t quite R-rated material. Released in New York in February 1976,
actor/director Ray Danton’s Psychic
Killer could have easily been a part of this screening as it, too, secured
a PG-rating. There is a fair amount of
violence and bloodshed in this film, not to mention a fairly gory Psycho-inspired shower murder with
nudity, to raise more than a few eyebrows (ironically, 1960’s Psycho has been given an R rating!)

Ostensibly shot between April and July
of 1974, Psychic Killer is a time
capsule of a film, a veritable authenticated record of gaudy clothes, bad
hairdos, enormous cars and men with oversized ties. Timothy Hutton’s father, Jim Hutton, fresh
from screaming at Kim Darby and her little imaginary creatures running around
the house in ABC-TV’s Don’t Be Afraid of
the Dark (1973), plays Arnold Masters, a sort of mama’s boy who lives like
a bit of a hermit. He is blamed for the
murder of a doctor (he didn’t kill him) and lands in prison where he meets
other disturbed persons. While
incarcerated, his mother passes away and this infuriates him as he feels that
her death is directly attributed to his absence. Masters soon obtains a medallion that has
mystical powers (it almost looks like the headpiece to the Staff of Ra in
Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost
Ark from 1981) and gives him the ability to leave his body in a sort of
Out-of-Body-Experience (OBEE) and seek out revenge against those who put him in
prison and those he deems responsible for his mother’s death (David Cronenberg
wrote a similar storyline several years later in one of his best films, 1979’s The Brood. That film was controversial as it employed
young children as mutant killers). When
Masters kills in this state, his body goes into a condition wherein he appears
dead. The film’s premise is based upon
the Kirlian Effect, which was written about extensively
in the 1970s. The idea is, if nothing
else, intriguing.

Two
cops assigned to the case are Lieutenant Anderson (Aldo Ray) and Lieutenant
Morgan (Paul Burke), partners who are desperate to stay one step ahead of Masters
before he can kill again. Also eager to
stop Masters is the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Laura Scott (Julie Adams,
real-life then-wife of director Danton). Mrs. Adams may have fled the clutches of TheCreature
from the Black Lagoon, but she has a tougher time bolting from the
occasional silliness that seeps into the script. There is a psychic expert in tow also, one
Dr. Gubner (Nehemiah Persoff) who informally teams with Dr. Scott to stop
Masters.

Psychic
Killer was previously
issued on DVD in 1999 and 2008. The new
Blu-ray/DVD combo, which are mastered from a 2K scan of the original camera
negative, are obvious steps above these previous releases, so the third time is
indeed a charm. This version by the fine
folks at Vinegar Syndrome comes with some nice extras specifically made for the
Blu-ray/DVD combo:

The
Danton Force
featurette (8:55) is comprised of onscreen interviews with relatives of the
late director of the film, Ray Danton. Steve Danton and Mitchell Danton, his sons, talk about how the film came
about and what it was like to be on the set. Their father’s work ethic had a huge impact on them and their chosen
professions. Their mother, Julie Adams,
appears briefly, as does Ronald L. Smith, the first assistant director. The opening prologue of the film, which
attempts to set the audience up with a serious tone, contains a voice over by
director Danton: "Why should any phenomenon be assumed impossible? The
universe begins to look more and more like a great thought, than a great
machine.”

The Aura
of Horror featurette (8:05) features Mardi Rustam, a Kurdish movie fan born
in Iraq who dreamed of making it in Hollywood. Amiable and well-spoken, Mr. Rustam describes writing to the movie
moguls of the day and making his was to the United States. Psychic
Killer’s original script title was I
Am a Demon. He also produced Raphael
Nussbaum’s Candice Rialson vehicle Pets
(1973), Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive
(1976), and 1985’s Evils of the Night,
which is due for a Blu-ray release by the end of the month also from Vinegar
Syndrome.

The Psychic
Killer Inside Me (13:32) focuses on producer Greydon
Clark, also
known for Satan’s Cheerleaders (1973), Without Warning (1980),and Joysticks
(1983). He heard about the Kirlian
Effect on the radio and was intrigued by it and thought it would make a great
premise for a film. The Kirlian Effect was also the working title of the film. Mr. Clark also wrote On the Cheap, a book about his adventures in the screen trade.

Rounding out the extras are multiple
television spots and the original theatrical trailer.

Angst is a 1982-lensed horror thriller based
upon the real-life case of Werner Kniesek, an Austrian loner who,
in 1972, shot and killed a random woman and spent time behind bars until his
release(!) in 1980 when he was set free on a
three-day furlough to search for employment. Gotta love their judicial system. Unfortunately, his murderous urges came back to the forefront, and three
other innocent people perished at his hands. It is this horrific event that Angst
depicts to startling effect.

Angst is extremely effective in depicting The
Psychopath, brilliantly played by Erwin Leder, on his first time out with a
gun, ringing the bell of a random home and, without reason, murdering the
elderly woman who answers the door, her husband falling by her side in shock
(the camera is attached to The Psychopath’s body to enhance the sense of unease
and make the audience play into his distorted mind). Captured and jailed, the problem that lies
with him is his inability to control himself. Why does no one do anything about this?

Blowing off his freedom and knowing
full well that he wants to murder again, he immediately sets out to find a
female victim to hurt (when he was thirteen, he was seduced into
sadomasochistic games by a woman in her forties, and this and similar scenarios
are reveled to the audience through the creepy and effective use of his
voiceover narration). An attempt to
seduce two young and attractive female diner patrons stops before it can get
started, and a taxi ride with a female driver ends abruptly before he can
muster the guts to harm her. Stressed,
he breaks into a house and finds a man in a wheelchair who can only recite the
word “Pappa”. When the mother and her
daughter return home, all hell breaks loose in real time as The Psychopath
tortures and eventually murders the house dwellers. He takes their dog and feeds him well, but is
eventually captured.

The most distressing parts of this film
are, of course, the murders, carried out before the eyes of the family
Dachshund who attempts to stop The Psychopath but ends up hiding under a
blanket in one of the film’s most heartbreaking moments. Actor Erwin Leder throws himself into the
role with such gusto and commitment it is almost unbearable to watch as he
strangles the mother, drowns the paraplegic, and stabs the tied-up daughter to
death, all for his own perverse reasons. We hear his thoughts through a perpetual voiceover that reveals why he
is the way he is. We want to reach into
the screen and scream at him to stop, though he is powerless to do so. Do we hate him? Do we feel sorry for him? In reality, Kniesek is still
alive and in prison, a fact that will make even pacifists ponder whether his
monstrous deeds should have seen him condemned to death.

As
far as the film goes, I don’t recall ever hearing about it in the days of VHS
rentals. The closest I ever came to
seeing anything this disturbing was the well-known Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) on video in 1992. Henry
was a composite of real-like serial killers, and even 2008’s The Strangers was based upon the brutal
and grisly Keddie Murders which took place on April 11, 1981, a case which, 35
years later, has gone completely cold.

Angst had a tough time
getting theatrical exhibition in 1983. Now, with the Internet and real images of people dying almost daily, the
film has had a much easier time of being distributed as the public is probably
almost numb to such imagery (sad to say). The film’s director, Gerald
Kargl, made this one film and although it is expertly made, it is also highly disturbing
and not for the faint of heart.

The Blu-ray
of the film from Cult Epics contains the following extras:

Is the film a masterpiece? Perhaps.
It is a powerful work, with cinematography by Polish
animator Zbig Rybczynski, and elegiac music by early Tangerine Dream member
Klaus Schultze. However, it is not the sort of film
that I would want to watch again…

Rush
is a band that has never taken itself seriously. In the 33 years I have followed The Boys, I
have come to regard them as musicians who have no trouble making fun of
themselves and this is an aspect of their personalities that endears them to so
many of us. The band’s use of the Three
Stooges theme to open many of their concerts since the 1980’s and their amusing
videos that open and close their later tours are proof that they don’t take
themselves seriously.

In
keeping in the spirit of such silliness, David Calcano’s 2015 book Rushtoons by Fantoons Vol. 2112 is a
tongue-in-cheek tribute to our favorite band by some world-class artists who
have created some beautiful cartoons that ape and good-naturedly poke fun at
Rush’s famous album covers, making visual puns and humorous references to
imagery that is as synonymous with Rush’s sound as hair is to Donald
Trump. The 23 talented artists showcased
are Mike Kazaleh, Chris Brubaker, Cristian Garcia, Raciel Avila Silva, Jose
Rodriguez Mota, Samanta Erdini, Angie Pik, Armin Roshdi, Drew Krevi, Juan
Riera, Tone Rodriguez, Camila Velarde, Min Jeong, Benny Jackson, Manuel
Sarmiento, Igor Teran, Gina Rivas, Rene Cordova, Paul Badilla, Rafael Luna,
Carlos Behrens, David Calcano, and Maryam Mahmodi Modhadam. Begun in April 2015 as a Kickstarter project,
Rushtoons by Fantoons Vol. 2112
quickly raised enough capital in 24 hours to become a reality. The final result is well worth the wait.

The
book is separated into seven chapters, beginning with a foreword by RIAB’s Ed
Stenger. Chapter 1 (Roll the Ads) features one of my favorite mash-ups of Corporate
America and Rush: Bill Gates sitting in a chair, pointing a remote control at a
window for MicrosoftPower Windows – clever! Chapter 2 (The Torontonian Cartoons) features
artwork that is most closely related to newspaper comics as they are black and
white with no color. The standout – Alex
sitting on a couch in a psychiatrist’s office, upset because “Geddy started
using keyboards!” Chapter 3 (Le Studio
D’Art) brings us back to color with visual puns on the motifs from the albums,
such as the Dalmatian running to a less-than-happy fire hydrant, and the same
dog chasing Neil who is driving a Red Barchetta. My favorite is the “Live Long and Prosper”
variant on Grace Under Pressure’s
amazing cover. Chapter 4 (Rushtoons)
features The Boys in comical variations on the Peanuts, Popeye, and even Eddie
Trunk is featured. My favorite explains
Alex’s closed eye on the cover of his 1994 solo album, Victor. Chapter 5 (In the
Mood Pin-Ups) features a cute send-up of the Presto cover with a buxom beauty; “Permanent Weathergirls”; and a humorous
parody of the Hold Your Fire cover as
a nude woman attempts to cover herself (use your imaginations on fire). Chapter 6 (Moving Pictures) encompasses
several nice Star Wars parodies, one
with Paula Turnbull’s turn as Leia in full slave girl garb. TheTwilight Zone, TheThree Stooges (how
can you not?), Raiders of the Lost Ark
(Indy trying to outrace the Vapor Trails fireball),
Miami Vice and The Terminator are all given the Rush treatment. Chapter 7 (Sugar Rush, The Cereals), the last
section, incorporates cereal box covers: Caress of Milk, Toasted to the Heart,
Permanent Flakes, Milk Under Pressure, Flakes for Echo…you get the idea!

I highly recommend this 170-page book to all dedicated
Rush fans. You can order a copy of Rushtoons by Fantoons Vol. 2112 online here at the Rush Backstage Club.

It is no secret that the earth is in a state
of constant and rapid change. Global
warming, economic impoverishment for a growing number of people who have few
options available to them, the threat of earthquakes in areas of the country
that are long overdue for a massive shaking – all of these are stress factors that
large segments of the population contend with daily.

The Chevron Richmond Refinery in Richmond, CA
was constructed by Standard Oil in 1901 and opened in 1902 (John D.
Rockefeller, who was a founder, chairman and major shareholder of the company,
became the richest man in the world following Standard Oil’s dissolution into
33 smaller companies). The refinery has
had its share of problems over the years, suffering explosions and fires in
1989 and again in 1999. On August 6,
2012, there was an eruption of such intensity that it displaced over 15,000
people living in the surrounding areas, residents who are still suffering the
ill effects of the disaster in the form of everything from respiratory infections
to cancer. It is this catastrophe that
begins Shalini Kantayya’s new documentary Catching
the Sun, a film that echoes a theme that is discussed at length by another
documentary that was recently released, Requiem
for the American Dream, in that the decisions made by a select few often
have vast and negative repercussions for many. Whereas the latter clearly paints a dark picture of the current state of
economic affairs in present-day US of A, the former offers a far more hopeful
view of life.

Catching
the Sun follows two people each representing two
superpowers. Wally Jiang, the president
of WesTech (a Chinese company from Wuxi, China though their website now shows
their China office as being in Shanghai) who believes that renewable energy
(RE) in the form of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells is the wave of the future, is
in a race with the US to become the dominant provider of PV solar panels which
convert sunlight into electric energy. Van Jones (author of The Green
Collar Economy and Rebuild the Dream) is a self-appointed gadfly in the US who dedicates his life’s work to improving
the lot of others through his attempts to get people on board with solar
power. In his view, this form of RE is
not just the answer to reducing the carbon footprint (i.e. pollution), but it’s
an excellent way to educate people, make them feel like productive members of
the community and therefore reduce crime and violence. In essence, give them a job, the prospect of
a decent future and ultimately, hope. Michele McGeoy, the founder of Solar Richmond, echoes his sentiment that
good jobs are an antidote to violence and crime. Paul Mudrow and Hal Aronson are both Solar
Richmond trainees studying to become photovoltaic solar panel installers. They hope that this will be their ticket to
a lucrative future.

Danny Kenny, CEO of Oakland-based Sungevity, points
out that the cost of solar has dropped 80% in last five to seven years. Oakland, unfortunately, is also home to much
abject poverty, and many young African-American males who never thought about
anything outside of their neighborhood, take classes and training on RE. Director Kantayya is obviously fascinated by
her subject, and her film does an admirable job of illustrating not only how
two countries see an opportunity for developing a nascent technology that has
yet to reach its potential, but also educating the audience on solar power in
layman’s terms. In the 1960’s, the race
to the moon by that decade’s end put the US and the then-Soviet Union (now
Russia) in a duke-it-out race wherein the US prevailed, due Americans’ resolve
to kick its nemesis’s bol'shaya
yagodichnaya myshtsa..

As of the writing of this review, China
reports that they have developed a way to make solar panels that convert not
only sunlight into energy, but raindrops into energy when it rains. This is a huge development as current solar
panels do not respond to anything other than sunlight.

Hopefully, the documentary will shed more
light on this fascinating subject (no pun intended).

Click here to
read more about Catching the Sun,
find screenings at nearby theaters, and also rent or download it on Vimeo.

Noam
Chomsky is widely regarded as one of the preeminent intellectuals in the
world. As the Institute Professor
Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he currently
works, he has also written over one hundred books, among them Power and Terror: Conflict, Hegemony, and the Rule of Force, Profit
Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order, and the forthcoming The Culture of Terrorism which he co-wrote with Brian Jones. A seemingly tireless octogenarian, it is Mr. Chomsky’s Weltanschauung that director’s
Peter D. Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott recorded over a period of
four years as the subject of their new and, unfortunately, quite timely
documentary, the elegiacally-titled Requiem
for the American Dream. The
film, which runs a mere 73 minutes, focuses on what Mr. Chomsky refers to as the
Ten Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power, which essentially are the
methods employed by the wealthy and powerful (or the “One Percent” as they are
so often referred to) to keep themselves rich and everyone else not rich. These methods, he contends, consist of reducing
democracy, shaping ideology, redesigning the economy, shifting the burden,
attacking solidarity, running the regulators, engineering elections, keeping
the rabble in line, manufacturing consent and, ultimately and most
significantly, marginalizing the population. The current state of life in America seems to be a result of corporate greed and public insouciance, or more
specifically a feeling that nothing can be done about it. There are, obviously, movements afoot to
combat these inequalities, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) being the most fervent and
obvious example by far. Over the course
of the film’s duration, Mr. Chomsky goes into detail on where America once was
(manufacturing being the predominant method of income during the 1950’s, the
most prosperous decade in the country’s history) and where it is now (in the
hands of financial institutions, which represent a select few), which is such a
far cry from how life used to be that he explains how the corrosive effect of
greed and class inequality has had such a negative effect on both the working
class and middle class collectively.

Fascinating to watch and never boring, the film matter-of-factly
uncovers the methods that businessmen, specifically those at the top, employ to
make sure that their interests are well cared for, regardless of the deleterious
effects they have on those near the bottom of the social ladder. In actuality, however, this is no different
than the methods that were used by the owners of the manufacturing giants that
built America in the first place. Cornelius
Vanderbilt (with his fleet of steamboats and later on, railroads), John D.
Rockefeller (oil, kerosene and, later on, gasoline), Andrew Carnegie (steel),
and J.P. Morgan (finance, electricity and steel) did not amass personal
fortunes ten times that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet by being nice
guys. Influencing presidents and doing
what needed to be done appeared to be viewed as necessary business tactics, and
what is happening in the country today
does not appear to be all that different than what has occurred in the past,
despite the passing of laws and legislation designed to protect workers from
tyrannical bosses. The major difference
is that today there are more people than ever before, and the size of the level
if inequality is tremendous and, as Mr. Chomsky points out, unprecedented. Although he never says it, the feeling that
you get from Mr. Chomsky is that unless there is a major public uprising (i.e.
revolution), it is unlikely that the current state of affairs will shift in the
national public’s favor anytime soon.

Click
here
for more information on the film and locate screenings that will be rolled out
over the next few months.

Varo
Venturi's Day 6 is another genre
outing that has made its rounds under different titles: Alien Exorcism (U.S.), Alien
Encounter (U.K.), 5 Giorni Sulla
Terra (Italy), Eirian-Baasasu-Ekusoshituto
(Japan), and 6 Days on Earth. Now out on DVD from One 7 Movies, Day 6 introduces a story that is
intriguing but tests the audiences' patience by inundating them with so much
information that it becomes a bit much to follow. Although spoken (and apparently also dubbed)
in English, there are no subtitles, and their absence is heavily felt. In a nutshell, the film is a fair attempt of
mixing aliens with evil spirits. Dr.
Davide Piso (Massimo Poggio) is a scientist who has dedicated his life's work
to the study of alien abductions. You
would think that he would have taken notes from Whitley Strieber's 1987 book on
the subject, Communion, as he speaks
with and studies people who claim to have been abducted. He is also interested in how these abductions
affect the person and their soul. The
aliens themselves look like they stepped off the cover of that best-selling
book.

After
a lecture that he administers on the subject, he is approached by Saturnia
(pronounced "sa-TURN-yah" and played by Laura Glavin), a woman half
his age who lets her sexual attraction to him be known. She asks him for help as she feels possessed
by some other form of life (couldn’t it just be PMS?) He soon discovers that an alien named Hexabor
of Ur is possessing her and, according to the Day 6 website (the film's official website), Hexabor of Ur is
"an alien entity coming from ancient ages, from the site of Ur, according
to the Bible the Abraham's city of birth. A regal and disdainful personality, with a sexual androgynous nature, s/he
believes to be the elected one, destined to entirely possess a human
'container'…" Loosely translated
form Italian, I am guessing. Dr. Piso
has developed a method of getting abductees to relive their experience of being
abducted by hypnotizing them in order to "exorcise" the alien that
has possessed them so to speak. He
employs this technique on Saturnia but soon learns that she cannot come out of
the hypnotic state, and this permits the Hexabor of Ur to flourish and attempt
to attack mankind. Desperate, Dr. Piso
keeps Saturnia sedated so that he can work to find a solution to get her out of
the hypnotic state.

The
film has received more than its fair share of negative reviews, but I would say
give it a chance. It's by no means a
great film, but it is very ambitious for the subject matter which attempts to
mix alien abduction with soul possession and does so nicely. I can't say that I have seen this type of
story before. Laura Glavin is quite good
as Saturnia. Ms. Glavin has been
appearing in the Italian television series Don Matteo since 2009 and is best
known to audiences for her work on that show. Massimo Poggio is also good as Dr. Piso, however this being an Italian
film, all the dialog is dubbed and sounds read from a script. Think Dario Argento. Just about all the dialogue is obviously
looped, but there is a fairly good car chase halfway through the film. It ain't To
Live and Die in L.A. (then again, what is?), but it's decent.

The
film was shot digitally and the lack of subtitles is puzzling. According to the end credits, shooting took
place in April 2009 (this is information that I have never seen disclosed in a
film credit before), so we are seeing this film nearly six years following its
production.

There are two extras on the disc. The first is a 56-minute “documentary” called Sci Real which is conducted in both
Italian (with English subtitles) and in English, and purports to be a
documentary on the phenomenon depicted in the film. The second is the
theatrical trailer.

I would have preferred the film to be in
spoken Italian with English subtitles. Perhaps a future Blu-ray release will contain just that.

I have been a fan of the Italian giallo subgenre for 30 years since my
initiation into it was precipitated by my first viewing of Creepers (1985), the severely cut version of Dario Argento’s Phenomena, my personal favorite film of
his. Subsequent viewings of films by
both Mr. Argento and his mentor, Mario Bava, as well as Lucio Fulci, Lamberto
Bava, Luigi Cozzi, and Michele Soavi solidified a love for the putrid and the
fantastic, and anyone who has seen these movies knows how delightfully
entertaining they are: off-kilter camera angles, ludicrous dialogue, and what
writer Todd French referred to as “a maddening narrative looseness” are present
in these films in a way that they are absent in other genres. There is just nothing like an Italian giallo film. With all of the mock horror films that have
been made going back to 1981’s Student
Bodies and the later, more contemporary and successful Scary Movie parodies, it was only a matter of time before someone
took on the giallo. Quite honestly I am surprised that it took as
long as it did.

Rey Ciso (Adam Brooks, who looks a lot
like Franco Nero in 1977’s Hitch-Hike
and also co-wrote and co-directed the film) is a film editor who actually cuts
movies on celluloid. Once a great editor
who worked with top-level directors, he suffered a tragic accident which cost
him four fingers and has been relegated to cutting movies with wooden
substitutes that look like they might be sound-designed by Jack Terry (John
Travolta) in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out
(1981). In fact, The Editor, which was shot in the summer of 2013, starts out much
the same way that Blow Out does, with
a movie-within-a-movie concerning a stripper who is accosted on her way home
from work (a nod to 1982’s Tenebre
when Ania Pieroni is attacked by a vagrant). There is a lot of blood as you can well imagine, and when the action
moves to the editor, we see a sad and decrepit man whose young, attractive female
assistant has the hots for him for some reason. His wife is a former actress who is beyond her prime and takes out her
frustration on him. If all of this
sounds depressing, it’s not, as the film is actually quite humorous in that
it’s a send-up of giallo films. If you are a fan of these movies to the same
extent that I am, you will recognize the obvious tips of the hat (or strokes of
the blade) to Mr. Argento’s Inferno
(1980) and Mr. Fulci’s New York Ripper
(1981). There are also myriad instances of silly dubbing (another staple of giallo), gratuitous nudity, and the
sound of the actors and actresses voices coming off as too theatrical and
forced. This is all deliberate as a
tongue-in-cheek salute to these movies that we love so much.

Now, unfortunately for Rey, someone is
killing people off all around him. Naturally he is the prime suspect, and a rookie detective (played by
Matthew Kennedy, who looks like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, who also co-wrote and co-directed
the film – do you see a pattern here?) is after him almost every second just
trying to pin the crimes on him. And
what would a giallo send-up be
without Udo Kier?

There is a conscious effort on the part
of the filmmakers to pay homage to the cinematography of this once great,
bygone era. The movie-within-the-movie
possesses a color palette that would do Luciano Tovoli and Romano Albani proud
as it harkens back to 1977’s Suspiria
and 1980’s Inferno respectively. The film is beautiful to look at in every
respect. Even the poster art is
gorgeous! It comes with a reversible
cover and I prefer the image on the inside which just screams “the 80’s”.

There are an abundance of extras in
this collection, and I appreciate the fact that Shout! Factory has done a
DVD/Blu-ray combo on this title. I
highly recommend The Editor for those
with a love for these films. The extras
are:

Making
Movies Used to Be Fun
(51:03) is a funny and entertaining behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Editor and reveals that most of the
people in front of the camera are also some of the people behind the
camera. Conor Sweeney, like the
aforementioned Brooks and Kennedy, contributed to the script.

Hook
Lab Interview
(7:11) sits with Norman Orenstein and Trevor Tuminski in a comedic look at
their musical contribution to the film.

Just
after the school year ended in June 1984, I went to a friend’s house on a
Friday night to watch the premiere of Carlin
on Campus, an HBO concert of one of my favorite comedians, the legendary
George Carlin. When the concert was
over, my friend switched around until he reached NBC-TV. They were airing When A Stranger Calls, a 1979 thriller starring Carol Kane, Charles
Durning, and Colleen Dewhurst. I saw the
film from the beginning, and the first twenty or so minutes had me utterly captivated. It presented a scenario that I found to be
terrifying, and apparently so did Rex Reed, whose proclamation “some of the
most terrifying sequences ever filmed” was used in the newspaper ads. I thought it was so original – until I saw
Bob Clark’s frightening Black Christmas
(1974) four years later and saw where the “inspiration” may have come from. But my impressions of the film never left
me.

SPOILER
ALERT: If you don’t want the film’s plot spoiled, do not read this review any
further as certain aspects will be revealed.

Released
on Friday, October 12, 1979, Fred Walton’s When
A Stranger Calls pits babysitter Jill Johnson (Carol Kane) in the home of
Dr. Mandrakis (Carmen Argenziano) and his wife (Rutanya Alda) who are going out
for the evening. Their two children are
upstairs asleep. An hour later, Jill
gets a phone call wherein the caller hangs up, and then a second one where a
mysterious voice asks her, “Have you checked the children?” Initially she thinks this is a friend of hers
playing a prank, but after three more of these calls throughout the night she
calls the police who brush it off as innocuous. Several more calls of this nature compel her to call the police back,
and they agree to trace the call, which is a good thing as the caller is
calling from another phone line inside the house and, horrifically, has
murdered the two children she is in charge of baby-sitting.

The
film then flash forwards seven years to Dr. Mandrakis’s new digs in Beverly
Hills. He has summoned police detective John
Clifford (Charles Durning) who handled his case. Curt Duncan (Tony Beckley), the killer, has
escaped from a mental facility. Dr.
Mandrakis wants Clifford to find him and take appropriate action to make sure
he doesn’t harm anyone else. Clifford is
only too happy to oblige. How he hopes
to succeed with this plan is not addressed. Incredibly, he confides this to a peer.

The
film is a feature-length version of the same director’s 1977 short film The Sitter, upon which the opening
sequence of the feature film is based. Unfortunately, once this sequence is over, the film moves in a
completely different direction, one that is nearly bereft of suspense until the
final reel. It’s almost as if the
remaining 80 minutes are there as filler before the credits role. Colleen Dewhurst is quite good as a woman
living in an apartment who attracts the unwanted advances of Duncan, who
appears meek and pathetic, but what single/divorced woman walks home alone at
night through dark areas and empty stairwells, only to get home and leave her
apartment door opened? One of the
biggest missteps the film makes is following the killer around and almost
painting him as a sympathetic character. How he became a monster who could kill two innocent children is never
addressed. In Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the mere
presence of Hannibal Lecter left the audience frightened and on edge. That is not
the case with this guy, who was played by an actor who was terminally ill
during shooting and passed away in April 1980. His inability to emote anything that would instill fear plays against
the character.

Carl
Denham (Robert Armstrong) remarks in Willis O’Brien’s King Kong (1933) that “every legend has a basis of truth” and When A Stranger Calls is no
exception. A real-life case in March 1950 provided the basis for an urban legend
that persists even to this day and has become the inspiration for many
television shows and movies alike.

The
performances by those in the film are all quite good, especially Carol Kane as
the baby-sitter. The situation she finds
herself in at the end of the film has the elliptical storyline that has become
a common trope in the genre.

Dana
Kaproff, who
also scored Empire of the Ants
(1977), Death Valley (1982), and
innumerable made-for-TV movies including Wes Craven’s Chiller (1985) and Fred Walton’s I Saw What You Did (1988), the latter also revolving around a telephone,
provides an exceptional musical score that is deserving of a better movie. The score is available here
from Kritzerland on CD and is worth having even if you’re not a fan of the
film.

The
film inspired a 1993 sequel with Durning and Kane returning under the direction
of Walton. In 2006, a theatrical remake
was released.

The
Blu-ray from Umbrella is an Australian Region 4 disc that either needs to be played on an
all-region player or on a computer with a Blu-ray drive and software that
strips the regional encoding to permit playback. The image is good and has some grain, which
is expected for a film shot 36 years ago. If you’re a fan of the film and are able to play it back, this is a
decent release despite the lack of extras.

When
I was a teenager, the Boy Scout troop that I was a member of consisted of
nearly 25 scouts. We had a few older scouts whom the rest of the younger scouts
looked up to, and during our weekend camping trips the seniors made every
effort to scare the beejezus out of us youngsters with ludicrous tales of
ghosts or killers hiding out in the woods. These stories were often woven
around a campfire in the late hours of the evening when we were all seemingly
vulnerable. During the summer of 1980, Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th was doing well at the box office, so I was already
aware of these “murderers in the woods”-themed films. This didn’t make it any
easier for us to go on camping trips! The
success of Friday the 13th gave birth
to countless carbon copies of young adults-being-stalked-in-the-woods films.
One such outing is the late Joe Gianonne’s Madman,
a film released in January 1982 by Jensen Farley pictures, a distribution
company responsible for other horror outings including Richard Ciupka’s Curtains (1983). The schematic premise of Madman is so basic and so bereft of suspense (at least by today’s
standards) that I hate to say anything negative about the film, simply because
the cast and crew involved in the making of it and showcased in the
behind-the-scenes extras are just such nice people! The film probably works great for young kids
who have never seen a horror film and are unfamiliar with all the extended
silences and dramatic “stings” that have become clichés that populate the
second half of the film. Madman opens at a campsite with a scene
that appears more silly than sinister. T.P. (Tony Fish) sports a ridiculous belt buckle with his initials on it
and does his best to scare a group of young campers and staff members with a
song about being killed in the woods. One of the leaders of the camp, Max (the late Carl Fredericks), talks
about some nut-job named Madman Marz who supposedly roams the wilderness
waiting for someone to yell out his name so he can wreak havoc on them.
Naturally, this only compels one dope in the group to yell out his name and
make fun of him, challenging Madman Marz to come get everyone prior to an
evening of illicit sex. How Madman eats
and survives the wilderness is never addressed. T.P. has the hots for Betsey
(Gaylen Ross of 1978’s Dawn of the Dead,
inexplicably cast here with the name of Alexis Dubin) and makes no bones about
it in a silly hot tub scene set to yet another song. The rest of the cast are a group of newbies
who are set up for slaughter but their personalities never reach the
likeability factor that Laurie, Linda and Annie reached in Halloween (1978).

There
is a fair amount of gore spilled in this film and by the end you sort of feel
glad that it’s all over. Madman Marz
could be considered the cinematic brethren of Andrew Garth in Tom DeSimone’s far
more entertaining Hell Night (1981) who
creeps around Garth Manor, or even Victor Crwley in Adam Green’s Hatchet movies. Hell
Night was the first film that Frank Darabont worked on (he’s not a fan of
it!) and it truly deserves a Blu-ray release.

What sets this new Madman DVD/Blu-ray combo set apart is Vinegar Syndrome’s wealth of
extras that appear on both formats:

-The
film boasts two separate running commentaries that run through the entire 90-minute
running time. They feature comments from director Joe Giannone, producer Gary
Sales and actors Paul Ehlers and Tony Fish.

-There
is an intro in HD that runs just under one minute as producer Gary Sales talks
before the Blu-ray presentation.

-Madman: Alive at 35 runs 21 minutes, is shot in HD and
features producer Gary Sales and actors Tom Candela and Paul Ehlers who discuss
the making of the film.

-The Early Career of Gary Sales is an interview with producer Gary Sales.
Shot in HD, it runs 14 min. and 15 seconds in length, but Mr. Sales speaks with
a great deal of energy and explains that he went to film school with director Armand Mastroianniwho,
at that time, had directed He Knows
You’re Alone (1980), a clear Halloween
(1978) rip-off. So, despite the sort
running time, he includes a wealth of info. It seemed like everyone was
making these types of horror films at the time, and Madman is loosely based upon the legend of Cropsey, who became famous in Staten Island,
NY. Mr. Sales also explains how he got his start in the industry by working on
a sex film in New York in 1973 entitled It
Happened in Hollywood. If you were looking to break into the film industry
in the early 1970’s, one way to do it was through the adult film industry. It
was here that he met Wes Craven who edited Hollywood,
as well as Peter Locke. Wes Craven and Peter Locke would go on to make The Hills Have Eyes in 1977, so
networking and making contacts are everything. What makes this
documentary/interview so fascinating is that we are given a first-hand account
by the producer as to what it took for him to not only get into the film
industry, but to get the ball rolling on Madman.
It wasn't like it is today, where somebody can make a film on a cell phone or
an iPad and simply upload it to someone.

-The Legend Still Lives is from 2011, which is strange as Code
Red had just released a 30th anniversary edition DVD at the
time. Shot in SD, it runs an
unbelievable 91 minutes (longer than the movie!) and gives you just about all
you would want to know about the film. Cast
and crew and other experts in the field of horror talk about the film and, in a
maneuver that would make Sean Clark happy, we are taken to the filming
location, only to find that most of the buildings that appeared in the film
have been torn down many years ago.

-There
is a stills & artwork gallery that runs over seven minutes and provides newspaper
ads and reviews.

-Music Inspired by Madman runs just over 13 minutes and consists
of submissions of music by fans. This
film has quite a following!

-In Memoriam runs almost six minutes and discusses
the passing of both Joe Giannone the director Carl Fredericks.

-Rounding
out the extras are brief discussions with Mr. Sales and Mr. Ehlers at a horror
film convention; TV spots, and the theatrical trailer.

I would recommend this to not only fans
of the film, but to fans of the genre who want an insight into filmmaking in
general, and what it took to get a film like this made in the
1970’s/1980’s.

Attempting
to view the Jess Franco filmography in its entirety is intimidating and
virtually insurmountable as the late writer/director had nearly 200 credits to
his name. Finding all of them on video
is nearly an impossible task, but thanks to DVD and Blu-ray, many of his most
revered titles are now available in high quality transfers. One of the most prolific directors in the
cinema, Mr. Franco, who hailed from Spain and passed away in 2013, was busy up
until the end of his life and while he openly chided the quality of his own
work (rightfully so in his later outings), he has legions of fans the world
over.

It
is impossible to look at the cinema of Italian director Dario Argento, who
himself was influenced by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Edgar Wallace, without
knowing that he was heavily inspired by his mentor Mario Bava. The colorful sets and off-kilter camera
angles are trademarks of both directors. The Girl Who Knew Too Much,
Mr. Bava’s 1963 film which is also known as The
Evil Eye and starred John Saxon, is considered by some to be the first giallo film (a subset of the Italian
horror film that is a thriller or a “whodunnit”), however another film that can
arguably don this mantle is Mr. Franco’s The
Sadistic Baron von Klaus (1962), a beautifully lensed black and white thriller
that must have been shocking to audiences at the time of its release in a
similar fashion to the reception that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) received here in the States two years earlier. Like Psycho,
Baron von Klaus has its origins in
literature. Based upon the novel The Hand of a Dead Man by David Khune, Baron von Klaus takes the monster out of
the monster and puts it into a human being. Along with Mr. Bava, Mr. Franco no doubt had an impact on Mr. Argento’s
style and themes. So-called trademarks
attributed to Mr. Argento appear in this film, such as a mysterious killer
donning black gloves; a self-appointed sleuth who attempts to unmask the
identity of the killer; the use of women as sexually desirable objects to be
possessed or dispatched with violently should they spurn the killer’s charms; and
the use of shadows. The plot involves
the titular character, Baron Von Klaus, who comes from a lineage that is cursed
by the ghost of a killer that is more than likely possessing the mind of our
poor anti-hero. Anyone born into this
family has the potential to become a murderer. This becomes a convenient excuse for Von Klaus to behave reprehensibly
and by today’s standards, the film is very tame. However, to have seen this type of story and
depiction of torture and murder in 1962 must have been extremely jarring, and
certainly must have made the audience uneasy. If Mr. Franco was willing to show them this, then they would have to be on their guard just in case he
showed them that.

Von
Klaus’s fiancée is a wonderful woman who loves him unconditionally and cannot
come to terms with the idea that her beloved might somehow be the same person
murdering young women. A police
inspector arrests the wrong man but eventually lets him go. In some ways, this is a segue thriller,
because on the one hand it takes elements of the supernatural which were so
prevalent in the Universal and Hammer thrillers of the preceding decades and
weaves it into this story which anticipates the types of thrillers that were to
become a mainstay of Euro-horror for many years later on. An element that appears multiple times in the
film is one that has been depicted in countless other examples of the genre so
as to become a cliché: a woman takes to the dark and deserted streets alone
after hours on her way home and virtually guarantees that someone will follow
and attack her. At the time this film
was made, it’s possible that audiences simply weren’t expecting someone to do
something so foolish, yet it happens in the dark and dead of night. If the film were remade today, the casting
directors could showcase a pretty young thing sporting the ridiculous white
earbuds that are all the rage, making it more convenient that ever for a killer
to sneak up on her undetected and dispense with her before she knew what hit
her.

Following
the knife-in-the-shower shock murder in the aforementioned Psycho, Baron von Klaus depicts
violence in an explicit and shocking way for the time. Contemporary audiences are numbed to screen
violence in a way that viewers 50 years ago could never have imagined. The dark shadows on the walls of the neighborhood
that the killer haunts are creepy and harken back to the Val Lewton thrillers.

The
new Kino Lorber Blu-ray is transferred from a print that has some imperfections such as
lines that may have been embedded in the emulsion, but nothing too distracting. Overall, this is a very sharp and beautiful
transfer.